Villerville Seen from Le Ratier (1855): Art, History and Details

Villerville Seen from Le Ratier (1855) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Charles François Daubigny (French, 1817–1878).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The town of Villerville on the Normandy coast appears just to the right of center in this expansive landscape by Daubigny, a pioneer of outdoor painting and a major influence on Claude Monet and the Impressionists. Daubigny introduced a new kind of natural landscape based on outdoor studies of light, water, and atmospheric conditions. Here, streaks of bright light along the horizon set off the dark masses of the rocky shore in the foreground.

Object facts

• Title: Villerville Seen from Le Ratier
• Date: 1855
• Creator attribution: Charles François Daubigny (French, 1817–1878)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 80 x 141.5 x 7.5 cm (31 1/2 x 55 11/16 x 2 15/16 in.); Unframed: 54.2 x 116.2 cm (21 5/16 x 45 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1951.323

A detail from the museum

Daubigny turned his boat, Le Botin (Little Box), into a studio where he painted while cruising the Seine, Marne, and Oise rivers in France.

Collection credit

Bequest of William G. Mather

Further reading listed by the museum

• Katalog französischer und altspanischer Meister: permanente Ausstellung von Werken erstklassiger deutscher, französischer, altenglischer und altspanischer Meister. Galerie Heinemann; (München). 1914.
• Francis, Henry S. "Bequest of William G. Mather: Paintaings." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art XXXVIII no. 8 (October, 1951):197-198.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.