Jules Dupré was a French painter best known for his dramatic landscapes which depicted the sparse forest regions around Paris and the stormy coastline of Normandy. Dupré was a key member of the Barbizon School of painters, which also included Théodore Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, and Jean-François Millet. Born April 5, 1811 in Nantes, France, he worked as a porcelain painter in a factory at the age of 12 until moving to Paris to work under the painter Jean-Michel Diebolt. Dupré began his career without any formal training and instead sharpened his technique by imitating the work of canonical landscape painters, such as Claude Lorrain and John Constable. In 1831, the artist debuted his work in the Salon at the age of 20 and quickly gained national recognition. On the popularity of Dupré’s work, contemporary art critic Clarence Cook remarked, “His pictures were rural poems, instilling quiet, happy thoughts, and from the first they won for him a warm place in the public heart.” The artist died on October 6, 1889 in L’Isle-Adam, France. Today, Dupré’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among others.