Essentially self-taught, Dupré began his career by painting landscape studies from nature in the environs of Paris. In 1831, at the age of twenty, he made his début at the Salon and shortly thereafter was invited to London by an admiring collector. During this sojourn, he became acquainted with the English school of landscape painting, and is credited with introducing the work of John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonington to his fellow painters at Barbizon. Towards the middle of his career, Dupré grew increasingly reclusive, exhibiting only occasionally, and ultimately turned to painting marine and coastal views at Cayeux-sur-Mer on the English Channel. Jules Dupré became almost from his début one of the favored in public opinion; his farms, his cottages, his old oaks on the borders of pools, his plentiful pastures, his mills which profile their silhouettes on a stormy sky, have a simple, truthful side which captivates all the world. –René Ménard, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, March 1873