In 1859, Troyon advised the young Claude Monet to work outdoors. It was one of several pieces of advice from established painters that nudged Monet toward what would become Impressionism. Troyon himself never made the leap. He remained a painter of cattle and landscape in the Barbizon tradition, though his animals stood in light that was beginning to dissolve solid form.

He was born in Sevres in 1810. His father worked at the famous porcelain manufactory, and the boy entered the ateliers young, spending years learning the minute decorative skills of porcelain painting. The precision served him well but took years to shake off. His early landscapes were tight and conventional.

The breakthrough came in 1846, when he travelled to the Netherlands and saw Paulus Potter's The Young Bull at the Hague, along with Cuyp's sunny landscapes and Rembrandt. He returned to France with a new approach: larger canvases, freer brushwork, and cattle as the central subject. Within a few years he was the leading animal painter in France, decorated with the Legion of Honour, five times a medallist at the Paris Salon, and collected by Napoleon III.

All his best pictures date from between 1850 and 1864. Success came late, and he never quite believed in it; even when he could command the market of several countries, he complained about his treatment. His mother, who survived him, established the Troyon prize for animal painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He died in Paris in 1865, at fifty-four, unmarried, after a period of deteriorating mental health.