Working more extensively in the open air than preceding artists, Charles François Daubigny (1817–1878) created new sorts of landscape formats that would prove highly influential. Among the stimulating new landscape motifs that he pioneered in the 1850s were: riverine landscapes from midstream, orchards in bloom, the ocean viewed frontally as sea and sky alone, and the moonlit French landscape. The young Impressionists took up these innovations in the early 1860s and popularized them.

Lynne Ambrosini earned the doctorate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts with a dissertation titled ““The Peasant in French Painting, 1815-48; The Romantic Roots of the Realist Mode,” supervised by Robert Rosenblum. She served as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts before moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, to lead the art division of the Taft Museum of Art. She managed the permanent collection, exhibition program, publications and other departments while organizing several exhibitions with scholarly catalogues in the field of 19th-century art. The most important of these was Daubigny, Monet, van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape, a partnership with the National Gallery of Scotland and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in 2016. Worldwide, almost 350,000 people saw the exhibition, which received many positive reviews for revising the understanding of early Impressionism. 

Selected other books include Rodin: The Cantor Gift to The Brooklyn Museum, (1987); Hiram Powers: Genius in Marble, co-author (2007); and Taft Museum of Art: Highlights from the Collection (2020). She has published articles and given invited talks on French artists Jean-François Millet, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin. A further interest in 19th-century American art patronage has produced articles on the collecting habits of Charles and Anna Taft, and Nicholas Longworth, all of Cincinnati.

Ambrosini’s awards include: Museum Professional of the Year, Ohio Museums Association, 2016; Distinguished Career Award, Association of Midwest Museums, 2016; Gold Award for Exhibition Catalogues, Ohio Museums Association, 2016. In 2020, the government of France awarded Ambrosini the rank of chevalier (knight) in the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to the knowledge of French art.