Path through a Wheat Field (Sentier dans les bles)

Cliché‑verre combines photographic exposure with traditional printmaking.

Cliché‑verre combines photographic exposure with traditional printmaking. Da Daubigny coated a glass plate with a light‑sensitive emulsion, drew the scene with a brush, and then exposed it to light before developing the image onto paper. The resulting print retains the painterly texture of his brushwork while achieving the tonal subtlety of a photograph, merging realism with a soft, atmospheric quality.

Da Daubigny, a leading figure of the Barbizon school, was an early adopter of the cliché‑verre method, which was explored by only a handful of artists in the mid‑nineteenth century. The work was produced during a period when he was expanding his print output beyond etching, contributing to the technique’s brief popularity among French landscape artists.

The print emerges at a time when French artists were increasingly turning to direct observation of nature, a shift that would later inform Impressionism. Da Daubigny's focus on everyday rural scenes and his experimental approach to print media place the work within the broader movement toward naturalism and technical innovation in the 1860s.