Rivering (Museum of Suspense IV)
Charles François Daubigny, River Landscape with Moon. c. 1860, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Ale Nodarse October 16, 2025
“To study rivers is to adopt another life.”
A white orb glistens. A sky swells forth. Daubs of orange-pink glow incandescent before falling into a warm blue — falling further again into a muted violet. And the sky folds on itself, so that the rivershore appears as an isthmus, a dark ground set between the sky and the sky’s double. The painting, Charles François Daubigny’s River Landscape with Moon (c. 1856–66, Leopold Museum), is a lesson in reflection.
Charles-François Daubigny, Night Journey. 1862.
The artwork is a study, among many, which Daubigny produced of the River Oise during the 1850s and 60s. As with most studies, it implies speed. The brush moves quickly, oil paint crossing atop the wooden panel as the horsehair bristles make themselves seen. Paint structures its own topography. In this case, the first ground layer of cream-colored oil remains visible beneath the secondary, darker tones. The effect (which a screen fails to capture) proves luminous. The light of the moon suffuses the landscape. It emerges as if from below, flickering through and under everything.
Daubigny knew the river he painted well. He had chosen to live and to paint upon it by setting himself within a floating studio called Le Botin or “The Little Box.” While the works within the Museum of Suspense have dwelt on the suspended figure in painting, Daubigny placed the artist and studio quite literally adrift –– and made a series of etchings to “document” the novelty of such a transformation. In one, the Night Voyage, Daubigny views himself and his boat from above, his little box a luminous if isolated flicker. (In reality, Daubigny was often accompanied by family and by fellow painters. Monet, too, would set up a floating studio.) In another scene, The Boat Studio, the box is amplified (fig. 3). The view to the landscape at the picture’s center emerges as a painting in miniature, while finished artworks sit to the painter’s right. They are the products of the little box and the river upon which it floats. The undated River Landscape with Moon most likely numbers among these.
Charles-François Daubigny, The Boat Studio. 1861.
On the etched “picture” closest to us, Daubigny adds a single word along the lower right corner -“Realism” (realisme), . This word was to insist on truth. This is how it was. It was also to insist on possibility: a subtle testimony to all that might emerge, beautiful and strange, when suspense took its place as a fixed condition rather than a momentary exception. The river suspended and estranged the painter, who willed the familiar unfamiliar and set it near at hand.
Today, we are familiar both with the moon and with the blue orb viewed from its horizon. Ventures to outer space, both scientific and commercial,) continue to insist and to capitalize upon the power of such a vantage. While a view from the moon back to earth may no doubt be a life-changing thing, Daubigny’s study reminds us that, when it comes to wonder, the river may suffice. Something of the moon is already, really, there. And there is another life.
¹ Jim Harrison, The Theory and Practice of Rivers (Livingston, 1989), 24.
²Bonnie Grad, “Le Voyage en Bateau: Daubigny’s Visual Diary of River Life,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter (1980): 123–27.
³See Edouard Manet’s painting of Monet Painting in His Studio Boat (1874; Neue Pinakothek, Munich). To an extent, Manet revealed the artist’s isolation and the distance between artist and subject, in Monet’s (and Daubigny’s) works, as exaggerated. See Harmon Siegel, Painting with Monet (Princeton University Press, 2024), 218–221.
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
