Daubigny's Garden by Bruno De Roover and Luc Cromheecke

Is it still a bandee dessinee if it's by two Dutch creators? I don't know if there's a manga/manwha equivalent for the European continent, with "comics" getting a slightly different name in each language that are still clearly similar. I mean, I'm pretty sure Germans and Danes and Poles and Slovaks don't all use the French term all the time, but the Franco-Belgian publishing industry is big and dominant enough that they all probably know it.

So I'm not sure what to call Daubigny's Garden, an album-length story in graphic format by Bruno De Roover and Luc Cromheecke, translated into English by James Vandermeersch in 2017. Maybe I'll just be quintessentially American and just call it "comics."

The title references three paintings of that name by Vincent Van Gogh, and the frame story here involves Van Gogh. But the bulk of the book is a quick potted life of a precursor, which is being told, sort of, by a local doctor to Van Gogh: Charles-Francois Daubigny of the Barbizon school. We see Daubigny born in 1818 and then follow him through his painting career, most often with his great friend Camille Corot, in a series of episodes that make the book somewhat staccato.

De Roover seems to be interested most in Daubigny's landscape work, and especially his painting out in nature - en plein air, I should probably say, if that isn't slightly anachronistic in this context - than in the outlines of his career. The episodes depicted here are mostly of Daubigny working, getting out to a hillside or down a river to paint some landscape. We do see him at a major salon a couple of times, but never in his studio and never making drawings, which was apparently his other major work.

Daubigny, as seen here, is a genial, friendly man, often self-deprecating and generally good-natured. There are no major upheavals or problems in his life - he has a very 19th century cough, from his infancy, which I think is meant to prefigure his death at the relatively young age of sixty-one. We see him working, and get minor background details that imply his career went well, and that he was successful, happy, and settled. But the book is about the painting, about how Daubigny loved to get out in the world, look at it, and try to fix it on his canvas.

Cromheeckie draws this book in a cartoony style; his people have big noses and eyes and his backgrounds are often sketchy blocks of color, especially on multi-panel, dialogue-heavy pages. He doesn't seem to be trying to ape Daubigny (or Van Gogh) in any way, which is entirely to the good. His style is light and engaging, which matches the lightness of the story De Roover is telling.

Daubigny's Garden is the kind of book where I suspect a museum or other cultural institution might have been behind it in some way: it's so specific about a culturally significant thing that it feels like someone wanted exactly that. I can't find any reference to that in the book itself, though: it may just be these two Dutch guys are huge fans of Van Gogh and/or Daubigny, and so this is just the book they wanted to do.