Best known as an engraver before his career as a painter began to flourish in the 1850s, Charles-François Daubigny created some of the most compelling landscape imagery of the nineteenth century. Associated with the Barbizon school and often regarded as a precursor to Impressionism, he forged a distinctive synthesis of tradition and modernity: the tonal subtlety and compositional intelligence of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters he studied and copied.

Daubigny’s career unfolded during a pivotal moment for the graphic arts in France. The first half of the century had been shaped by the invention of lithography and the rapid expansion of commercial and reproductive printmaking. By around 1860, however, many artists returned to etching as a medium that promised greater artistic autonomy. This shift, later termed the Etching Revival, encouraged artists to redefine themselves as painter-printmakers and to look anew to Old Master techniques. A leading advocate was the publisher Alfred Cadart (1828–1875), who in 1862 founded the Société des Aquafortistes to promote etching to artists and the broader public. Cadart also helped expand the etching market internationally, bringing prints, materials, and contemporary French art to the United States, and supporting the establishment of etching schools in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Among his publications was Daubigny’s album Le Voyage en Bateau, croquis à l’eau-forte (1862), a landmark in the renewed enthusiasm for etching.

Celebrated for painted views of French riverbanks and coastlines, Daubigny nonetheless sustained himself for many years through graphic work, producing illustrations for books, magazines, and travel guides. The present drawing, dated 1859, belongs to a group of thirty-one sheets that remained together until first coming to wider attention within the last decade. Created at a time when image reproduction was still largely manual, such works can be understood as transfer drawings: working sheets designed to translate an image from an initial composition onto an etching plate, woodblock, or other reproductive medium. Far from merely functional, they reveal the vigor, precision, and inventiveness of Daubigny’s draughtsmanship, offering an unusually direct insight into his working methods and pictorial imagination.

The present transfer drawing was used for Daubigny's etching Soleil couchant from 1859, printed by Auguste Delâtre and published by Gazette des Beaux-Arts.