He had passed his youth with his nurse in a little village, surrounded with white-blossoming apple trees and waving fields of corn, near L'Isle Adam. Here as a boy he received the impressions which made him a painter of the country, and which were too strong to be obliterated by a sojourn in Italy. The best picture that he painted there showed a flat stretch of land with thistles. A view of the island of St. Louis was the work with which he first appeared in the Salon in 1838. Daubigny is the painter of water, murmuring silver-grey between ashes and oaks, and reflecting the clouds of heaven in its clear mirror. He is the painter of the spring in its fragrance, when the meadows shine in the earliest verdure, and the leaves but newly unfolded stand out against the sky as bright green patches of colour, when the limes blossom and the crops begin to shoot. A field of green corn waving gently beneath budding apple trees in the breeze of spring, still rivers in which banks and bushy islands are reflected, mills beside little streams rippling in silvery clearness over shining white pebbles, cackling geese, and washerwomen neatly spreading out their linen, are things which Daubigny has painted with the delicate feeling of a most impressionable lover of nature. At the same time he had the secret of shedding over his pictures the most marvellous tint of delicate, vaporous air; especially in those representations, at once so poetic and so accurate, of evening by the water's edge, or of bright moonlight nights, when all things are sharply illuminated, and yet softly shrouded with a dream-like exhalation. His favourite light was that of cool evening dusk, after the sun and every trace of the after-glow has vanished from the sky. Valmandois, where he passed his youth, and afterwards the Oise, with its green banks and vineyards and hedged gardens, the most charming and picturesque river in North France, are most frequently rendered in his pictures. Every day, when nature put on her spring garb, he sailed along the banks in a small craft, with his son Charles. His most vigorous works were executed in the cabin of this vessel: spirited sketches of regions delicately veiled in mist and bound with a magical charm of peace, regions with the moon above them, shedding its clear, silver light--refined etchings which assure him a place of honour in the history of modern etching. The painter of the banks of the Oise saw everything with the curiosity and the love of a child, and remained always a naïve artist in spite of all his dexterity. [Illustration: ROSA BONHEUR. THE HORSE-FAIR. (_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, the owner of the copyright._)] [Illustration: ROSA BONHEUR. PLOUGHING IN NIVERNOIS.]