In 1836, after a year-long study of the paintings of Old Masters in Italy, Daubigny returned to Paris and began to paint historical and religious works. In 1838, the same year he enrolled in the class of Paul Delaroche (Delaroche, Paul) at the École des Beaux-Arts, he exhibited at the official Salon for the first time.

In his youth he had illustrated books, but his true leanings were toward landscape painting as practiced by the Barbizon school, an informal association of painters who rebelled against the formulas of traditional landscape painting in favour of working out-of-doors, directly from nature. Like Camille Corot (Corot, Camille), Daubigny painted in the Morvan district, and in 1852, after the two had met, Daubigny's work began to depend on a strict observation of tonal values fortified by a concealed but indispensable minimum of compositional structure. Such works, though calm and unspectacular, soon gained success, one of them, Spring (1857), being bought by the emperor Napoleon III in 1857. Later in the 1850s, Daubigny's style, though still restrained, began to express a more personal lyricism. He increasingly employed graduated light reflections from surfaces to give effects of space; such methods also were directed at conveying a momentary impression of the landscape.

Although associated with the Barbizon school, Daubigny never lived among them; he is best seen as a link between the more classically organized naturalism of Corot and the less-formal visual receptiveness of his young friends Claude Monet (Monet, Claude) and Alfred Sisley (Sisley, Alfred).