Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875)

The most prominent French landscape painter before the impressionists was Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He is perhaps best known for his highly poeticized pure landscapes that are refined evocations of mood, but there are several critical aspects of his long career. His early Italianate landscapes are small, succinct and transfused with the limpid light of the South. He is the author of grand historical compositions of mythological or biblical subjects within elaborate landscape settings. His large figurative compositions were also much admired, avidly collected.

Corot's work is embedded in the grand tradition of French painting. His work hearkens back to the bucolic landscapes of the 17th-century master, Claude Lorraine. It also resonates with the arcadian fantasies of the French 18th century in its combination of the classicism of Nicolas Poussin with the lyricism of Jean-Antoine Watteau. Despite these traditional affinities, Corot was very much a part of the revolutionary trends of 19th-century painting. At age twenty-six, Corot began his formal training under the French painter Achille Etna Michallon, and later Michallon's teacher Jean Victor Bertin. From them and during a stay in Rome, he learned the classical compositions and subjective realism which formed the basis for his early landscapes.

The zenith of his career came relatively late, in the late 1840s and 1850s, when his fully realized, large-scale Salon paintings were highly coveted. In 1855, Corot enjoyed official success when Napoleon III purchased the landscape for which he won a first-class medal at the Exposition Universelle. His landscapes frequently include mythological figures but he balanced the narrative demands of history painting by emphasizing the poeticized landscape with subtle effects of light and weather. Corot emphasized form and tone at the expense of detail. It is the general mood that preoccupied him, an approach that led him to embrace evocative titles such as souvenir (remembrance) or effets (impressions). He was a master of tonality, subtly manipulating hues that are extremely close in value. In his later works of the 1860s and 1870s, his dreamy palette verged on the monochromatic and his reputation was well established; Corot had become "Pere Corot", one of the most revered artists of his time.

 

He was friends with his contemporaries, the Barbizon artists Jean-François Millet, Charles François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau, although he never adopted their precise realism nor the earthy poetry of their renderings of Fontainebleau. He supported Honoré Daumier financially as well as philosophically; he encouraged the young Odilon Redon; and, as one of the first artists to paint out-of-doors ("en plein air"), he acted as mentor to the impressionists. Unlike this younger generation of artists, Corot did not break up light into its constituent colors; he arranged and simplified his shapes in order to achieve a classical pattern. Indeed he has been admired by a diverse range of artists including including Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, and Pablo Picasso. If his bathers look back to the 18th century, they may also presage the compositions of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. The reductive poetry of his moody landscapes appealed to 20th-century champions of modernism. 

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