the 11th of February 1795. In 1808 he went to Winchester, and in 1810 he was elected to a demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, where the lectures of Dr Kidd first awakened in him a desire for the cultivation of natural science. In 1814 he graduated with second-class honours, and in the next year he obtained the prize for the Latin essay. From 1815 to 1818 he studied medicine in London and Edinburgh. He took his M.D. degree at Oxford, and was a fellow of the College of Physicians. In 1819, in the course of a tour through France, he made the volcanic district of Auvergne a special study, and his Letters on the Volcanos of Auvergne were published in The Edinburgh Journal, 1820–21. He was elected F.R.S. in 1822. By subsequent journeys in Hungary, Transylvania, Italy, Sicily, France and Germany he extended his knowledge of volcanic phenomena; and in 1826 the results of his observations were given in a work entitled A Description of Active and Extinct Volcanos (2nd ed., 1848). In common with Gay Lussac and Davy, he held subterraneous thermic disturbances to be probably due to the contact of water with metals of the alkalis and alkaline earths. In November 1822 Daubeny succeeded Dr Kidd as professor of chemistry at Oxford, and retained this post until 1855; and in 1834 he was appointed to the chair of botany, to which was subsequently attached that of rural economy. At the Oxford botanic garden he conducted numerous experiments upon the effect of changes in soil, light and the composition of the atmosphere upon vegetation. In 1830 he published in the Philosophical Transactions a paper on the iodine and bromine of mineral waters. In the following year appeared his Introduction to the Atomic Theory, which was succeeded by a supplement in 1840, and in 1850 by a second edition. In 1831 Daubeny represented the universities of England at the first meeting of the British Association, which at his request held their next session at Oxford. In 1836 he communicated to the Association a report on the subject of mineral and thermal waters. In 1837 he visited the United States, and acquired there the materials for papers on the thermal springs and the geology of North America, read in 1838 before the Ashmolean Society and the British Association. In 1856 he became president of the latter body at its meeting at Cheltenham. In 1841 Daubeny published his Lectures on Agriculture; in 1857 his Lectures on Roman Husbandry; in 1863 Climate: an inquiry into the causes of its differences and into its influence on Vegetable Life; and in 1865 an Essay on the Trees and Shrubs of the Ancients, and a Catalogue of the Trees and Shrubs indigenous to Greece and Italy. His last literary work was the collection of his Miscellanies, published in two volumes, in 1867. In all his undertakings Daubeny was actuated by a practical spirit and a desire for the advancement of knowledge; and his personal influence on his contemporaries was in keeping with the high character of his various literary productions. He died in Oxford on the 12th of December 1867.
See Obituary by John Phillips in Proceedings of Ashmolean Soc., 1868.
DAUBIGNY, CHARLES FRANÇOIS (1817–1878), French landscape painter, allied in several ways with the Barbizon School, was born in Paris, on the 15th of February 1817, but spent much time as a child at Valmondois, a village on the Oise to the north-west of Paris. Daubigny was the son of an artist, and most of his family were painters. He began to paint very early in life, and at the age of seventeen he took a studio of his own. Within twelve months he had saved enough to go to Italy, where he studied and painted for nearly two years; he then returned to Paris, not to leave it again until, in 1860, he took a house at Auvers on the Oise. By 1837 Daubigny had become famous as a river and landscape painter, although he had been devoting himself as well to drawing in black-and-white, to etching, wood engraving, and lithography. In 1855 his picture, “Lock at Optevoz,” now in the Louvre, was purchased by the state; four years later Daubigny was created knight of the Legion of Honour, and in 1874 he was promoted to be an officer. In 1866, at the invitation of Lord, then Mr, Leighton and others, he visited London, where, however, he was hurt by his now famous “Moonlight” being badly hung in the Old Royal Academy. But the personal encouragement of his admirers in England made up for the disappointment, and the sale of his picture to a Royal Academician greatly pleased him. In 1870–1871 he again visited London, and subsequently Holland, where he painted a number of river scenes with windmills. In 1874, having returned to Paris, he fell ill, and from that time until he died (on the 19th of February 1878) his work won less distinction than before. In 1904 the municipality of Auvers-sur-Oise decided to erect a bronze monument to Daubigny’s memory.
Daubigny’s finest pictures were painted between 1864 and 1874, and these for the most part consist of carefully completed landscapes with trees, river and a few ducks. It has curiously been said, yet with some appearance of truth, that when Daubigny liked his pictures himself he added another duck or two, so that the number of ducks often indicates greater or less artistic quality in his pictures. One of his sayings was, “The best pictures do not sell,” as he frequently found his finest achievements little understood. Yet although during the latter part of his life he was considered a highly successful painter, the money value of his pictures since his death has increased nearly tenfold. Daubigny is chiefly preferred in his riverside pictures, of which he painted a great number, but although there are two large landscapes by Daubigny in the Louvre, neither is a river view. They are for that reason not so typical as many of his smaller Oise and Seine pictures.
The works of Daubigny are, like Corot’s, to be found in many modern collections. His most ambitious canvases are: “Springtime” (1857), in the Louvre; “Borde de la Cure, Morvan” (1864); “Villerville sur Mer” (1864); “Moonlight” (1865); “Andrésy sur Oise” (1868); and “Return of the Flock—Moonlight” (1878).
His followers and pupils were his son Karl (who sometimes painted so well that his works are occasionally mistaken for those of his father, though in few cases do they equal his father’s mastery), Oudinot, Delpy and Damoye.
See Fred Henriet, C. Daubigny et son œuvre (Paris, 1878); D. Croal Thomson, The Barbizon School of Painters (London, 1890); J. W. Mollett, Daubigny (London, 1890); J. Claretie, Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains: Daubigny (Paris, 1882); Albert Wolff, La Capitale de l’art: Ch. François Daubigny (Paris, 1881). (D. C. T.)
DAUBRÉE, GABRIEL AUGUSTE (1814–1896), French geologist, was born at Metz, on the 25th of June 1814, and
educated at the École Polytechnique in Paris. At the age of
twenty he had qualified as a mining engineer, and in 1838 he was
appointed to take charge of the mines in the Bas-Rhin (Alsace),
and subsequently to be professor of mineralogy and geology at
the Faculty of Sciences, Strassburg. In 1859 he became engineer
in chief of mines, and in 1861 he was appointed professor of
geology at the museum of natural history in Paris and was also
elected member of the Academy of Sciences. In the following
year he became professor of mineralogy at the École des Mines,
and in 1872 director of that school. In 1880 the Geological
Society of London awarded to him the Wollaston medal. His
published researches date from 1841, when the origin of certain
tin minerals attracted his attention; he subsequently discussed
the formation of bog-iron ore, and worked out in detail the
geology of the Bas-Rhin (1852). From 1857 to 1861, while
engaged in engineering works connected with the springs of
Plombières, he made a series of interesting observations on
thermal waters and their influence on the Roman masonry through which they made their exit. He was, however, especially distinguished for his long-continued and often dangerous experiments on the artificial production of minerals and rocks. He likewise discussed the permeability of rocks by water, and the effects of such infiltration in producing volcanic phenomena; he dealt with the subject of metamorphism, with the deformations of the earth’s crust, with earthquakes, and with the composition and classification of meteorites. He died in Paris on the 29th of May 1896.
His publications were: Études et expériences synthétiques sur le métamorphisme et sur la formation des roches cristallines (1860); Études synthétiques de géologie expérimentale (1879); Les Eaux souterraines à l’époque actuelle (2 vols., 1887); Les Eaux souterraines aux époques anciennes (1887).
