Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Bio

Corot’s later landscapes are among the most sought after and influential paintings of the nineteenth century; but the path he followed to this success was intensely individual. His earlier works, however, particularly those done in Italy, also marked a new departure in French painting – the elevation of the plein-air sketch to the status of finished studio paintings. Born in the late eighteenth century, Corot combined genuine respect for classical landscape principles with a deeply felt personal vision that often gives his work a startling naiveté. His skills with a paint brush were hard won, but his incomparable eye for subtle color variation seems to have been inborn. Corot is usually associated with the Barbizon school of landscape painters, many of whom were close personal friends, but Corot’s landscapes themselves often have more in common with the seventeenth-century paintings of Poussin or the turn-of-the twentieth-century compositions of Cézanne. Corot was probably the most peripatetic landscape painter of any age, traveling regularly between his favourite sites like Ville d’Avray or the Morvan and more distant regions such as La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast or Switzerland. At the Salon of 1835, he exhibited Hagar in the Wilderness (New York, Metropolitan Museum), a highly original historical landscape of great ambition. Corot spent the summer of 1840 in the Morvan; he made a third trip to Italy in 1843. By 1844 he was a friend of Théodore Rousseau. In 1845 the city of Paris commissioned Corot to paint an altarpiece for a Parisian church. During the short-lived liberalization of the Salon under the Republic, Corot was elected to the Salon Jury in 1848 and 1849 and was awarded a second-class medal in 1848. Around 1850, he established a friendship with Millet. At the 1850-51 Salon Une Matinée (Dance of the Nymphs) was purchased by the state and shown at the Musée du Luxembourg (now Paris, Musée d’Orsay). In 1854 Corot was in Auvers with Daubigny, a friend of some years; he also traveled in Holland and Belgium. Six of his paintings were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 and won a first-class medal. He continued making figure paintings and his first etchings during the late 1850s. While working at Saintonge, in 1862, he met Courbet and in 1864, his Souvenir of Mortefontaine (Paris, Musée du Louvre) was purchased by the Emperor and widely reproduced during the following decade, thus establishing Corot’s fame with a broader audience.

In 1866 and 1867, several Corot paintings were shown in New York and Boston by the French dealer Cadart. Seven paintings and a second-class medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 clearly established Corot’s importance in the much-heralded triumph of French landscape painting. His paintings were shown by Durand-Ruel in London and in numerous exhibitions in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere. He died in February, 1875 and a significant retrospective exhibition was held at the École des Beaux-Arts in May of the same year.