October

Charles-François Daubigny painted this stretch of French farmland in 1850, showing the countryside after the harvest has been gathered in. The fields spread out flat and brown, dotted with thin ribbons of smoke where farmers are burning off the leftover stubble. Near the left edge, a plain wooden cart and a pale haystack break up the emptiness, while a scatter of birds circles through a wide, soft gray sky. Nothing about the scene tries to impress you. It simply shows the land doing its work at the tail end of the growing season.

As a member of the Barbizon school, Daubigny belonged to a circle of artists who packed up their paints and headed outdoors to capture nature exactly as it looked in front of them. That habit of working in the open air fed directly into the ideas the Impressionists would run with a few decades later. His quick, loose brushstrokes and his focus on damp weather over crisp detail come through clearly here. The washed-out browns and grays, paired with the hazy smoke drifting across the fields, give the painting a hushed and slightly gloomy mood that matches a chilly late-October afternoon.