This summer's major show at Scotland's national gallery features a different kind of craft.
Inspiring Impressionism, at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, features a life-size model of the boat in which landscape painter Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-78) painted on the Oise and the Seine.
The show, the first major international show of the work of the pioneering French painter, a man who hugely influenced Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh, features the boat, replete with his supplies for a day's painting on the water including food and drink.
A screen on an easel on the boat gradually fills up with a painted image, while birdsong fills the air.
The boat, in which visitors can sit, also shows video of the river from which Daubigny, an artist little-known today, would paint his scenes.
The exhibition, which opens on June 25, will bring together 95 works from across the world and, curated by Dr Frances Fowle, is a collaboration between the Scottish National Gallery, the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, USA and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The Scottish National Gallery is exclusively hosting the UK’s only showing of the show.
Inspiring Impressionism features major paintings by all three artists, on loan from some of the most famous art collections in the world, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and many other American museums; from London the British Museum, the National Gallery and Tate; and the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Dr Fowle said: "It's something that's a little bit different and hopefully brings some of the ideas in the exhibition to life.
"It's a studio boat, as featured in one of the rooms in the show, and it has been put together very carefully from an etching.
"The idea is that you are on the boat, looking out over the river, listening to the tweeting birds on the Oise or the Seine.
"The idea that he himself is here, sketching.
"He was quite adventurous - the boat was a converted barge with a cabin and he could erect an easel, he could cook on it, and also put up a sail."
She added: "Daubigny was not an impressionist, he was before them, and anticipated many of the practices that we associate with them, including painting out of doors.
"He constructed the studio boat in 1857, well before Monet, who constructed his in 1872.
"He was haled by the critics as the new leader of this kind of landscape painting, and he was the crucial step between the previous generation and Impressionism.
"Without artists like Daubigny, perhaps it would not have taken place. He was quite successful in his day, but he was perhaps eclipsed by the following generation."
Other significant comparisons in the show include works by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and Alfred Sisley (1839-1899).
Daubigny, the galleries say, "anticipated and influenced many of the practices associated with Impressionism through unusual and innovative compositions, his radically ‘unfinished’ style and the practice of regularly painting out-of-doors."
In 1865, almost a decade before the 1874 group exhibition that first elicited the label ‘Impressionism’, Daubigny was referred to as the “leader” of the “school of the impression”.
The exhibition is sponsored by EY, the tax and assurance advisory company.
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