The French landscape painter Antoine Chintreuil was born in Pont-de-Vaux in 1814. He showed a gift for drawing at an early age, and received instruction from a family friend. He began working in the atelier of the painter Paul Delaroche in 1842. But it was Camille Corot whose influence bolstered his fondness for landscape painting and who urged him to paint outside, or en plein air. From 1850 to 1857 he lived in Igny and frequently painted in Barbizon. Chintreuil is considered an important and long-neglected forerunner of Impressionism, admired for his sovereign treatment of atmospheric lighting. From 1857 he lived and worked in La Tournelle-Septeuil in the Seine Valley, where he died in 1873. His late works were the high point of his career.
