The youngest of the group proper was Charles François Daubigny, who was born in Paris in 1817, and died there in 1878. He was the son of a well-known miniature painter, and passed his youth in the country, where he imbibed the love for simple nature which he afterwards rendered with less of fervor than Rousseau, with less poetry than either Corot or Dupré; but, in his way, with as much or more of truth. His task was easier. In the progress which landscape painting had made, there were hosts of younger painters, each adding a particle of truth, each making an advance in technical skill and daring, and Daubigny profited by it all. Corot, it is true, had never been afflicted with the preoccupation of combining the freshness of nature with the _patine_ with which ages had embrowned the old gallery pictures; but Daubigny, looking at nature with a more literal eye than Corot, ran a gamut of color greater than he. It was Daubigny who said of Corot, in envious admiration: "He puts nothing on the canvas, and everything is there." His own more prosaic nature took delight in enregistering a greater number of facts. Floating quietly down the rivers of France in a house-boat, he diligently reproduced the sedgy banks, the low-lying distances the poplars and clumps of trees lining the shore, and reflected in the waters. He painted the "Springtime," now in the Louvre, with lush grass growing thick around the apple trees in blossom; with tender greens, soft, fleecy clouds, and the moist, humid atmosphere of France; without preoccupation of rich color, of "brown sauce," of "low tone," of the thousand and one conventions which have enfeebled the work of men stronger than he. Thus he fills a middle place between the men who made an honest effort at painting nature as they saw and felt it, but could not altogether rid themselves of their early education, and the lawless band who, with the purple banner of impressionism, now riot joyously in the fields, with brave show of gleaming color, and fearless attempt to enlist science in their ranks. [Illustration: SERVANT AT THE FOUNTAIN. FROM A PAINTING BY FRANÇOIS SAINT BONVIN. From the Salon of 1863; now in the Luxembourg galleries. A quiet scene, essentially French from the type of the woman to the "fountain" of red copper so often seen in French kitchens, it recalls the work of the old Holland masters, and proves that, in our day, and with material near at hand, one can be thoroughly modern, and yet claim kinship with the great painters of the past.]