Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1874)

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: The Woman in Blue

  

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Venus at Her Bath

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1874)

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Landscape at Arleux-du-Nord

  

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Return of the Hayers to Marcoussis

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1873)

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: A Shady Resting Place

    

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: La route de Sin-le-noble près de Douai

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Smyrne-Bornabat

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Venus Clipping Cupid's Wings

  

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Ville d'Avray, the Pond seen through the Foliage

Ville d'Avray (1873)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Ville d'Avray - Le Cavalier à la entrée du bois

During the last years of his life, public affection for Corot had deepened. His popularity had not waned and collectors and dealers alike waited impatiently for his paintings to dry so they could be released from the artist's studio. At the Salon, he continued to be a success, although now that he was either on the jury or served hors concours, his works were automatically accepted. The reviewers of the Salons wrote long elegies on the 'poet of the landscape'.

Corot had become the grand old man of French painting. Young painters such as Berthe Morisot sought out his instruction and approval. Camille Pissarro described himself in his entries to the Salon as 'student of Corot' in an effort to win more respect from his contemporaries and many others did the same. And unexpectedly, Corot was adopted by the critics of the New Painting: Emile Cola, Theodore Duret and Edmond Duranty all considered Corot to be the progenitor of Impressionism. At one time or another, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Pierre Auguste Renoir all experimented with Corot's method and technique.

In Ville d'Avray - Le chevalier à l'entrée du bois, Corot deftly captures the effect of the diffuse, pale sunlight. The figure and his horse merge into the landscape and are in complete harmony with their surroundings. The critic Edmund About wrote: 'No artist has more style or can better communicate his ideas in a landscape. He transforms everything he touches, he appropriates everything he paints, he never copies, and even when he works directly from nature, he invents. As they pass through his imagination, objects take on a vague and delightful form. Colors soften and melt; everything becomes fresh, young and harmonious. One can easily see that air floods his paintings, but we will never know by what secret he manages to paint air.' (Quoted in G. Tinterow, Corot, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, pp. 236-237).

Corot has deftly combined all of the elements of his style into Ville d'Avray - Le chevalier à l'entrée du bois, and he uses his unique ability to portray light to bind these elements into a cohesive whole. A figure on horseback, his back to the viewer, makes his way down a sun-dappled path heading to a forest. A woman, perhaps a faggot gatherer taking a rest from her back breaking work, is seated to the side of the road and watches the rider approach. The path is lined by silvery toned birch trees which filter the sunlight onto the sandy path. In the distance, the village peeks through the trees that surround it, hinting at the rider's destination.

With a palette of grays, greens, browns and white, Corot has captured the essence of a late afternoon on the edge of a forest. The silence is palpable, the serenity complete. Overhead, patches of blue sky are punctuated by bright clouds. Through his palette and his ability to capture nature's subtleties, Corot has told the viewer that it is late afternoon in summer. [Christie’s]

A Dune at Dunkirk (1873)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: A Dune at Dunkirk

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot traveled to Dunkirk at the end of July 1873 to paint with his friend, Charles-François Daubigny. It was Corot's second visit to the area, having been there sixteen years prior in September 1857. Situated in the Nord Pas-de-Calais region of France, near the border with Belgium, Dunkirk, with its old port, structural ramparts, and surrounding dunes, provided Corot with ample motifs for his painting. Of the six paintings of Dunkirk recorded in Alfred Robaut's Corot catalogue raisonné, the present painting is the largest and the only one in which reference to the town is completely abandoned. The absence of architectural elements allowed Corot to focus solely on the effects of light as it played across the stark dune landscape. Working en plein air, he rendered this topography in a harmony of beiges and greens which he punctuated with the presence of human figures to provide accents of color. [Christie’s]

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1872)

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Crecy-en-Brie, Road in the Country

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Old Bridge at Limay, on the Seine

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Saint-Nicholas-les-Arras, 

Small Willows on the Banks of the Scarpe

  

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Souvenir of Ville d'Avray

The Parc des Lions at Port-Marly (1872)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: The Parc des Lions at Port-Marly

Camille Corot, whose art was halfway between Romanticism and Realism, preferred to paint a nature that inspired poetry and bucolic fantasy than to render it realistically as Courbet did. A pioneer of plein air painting, throughout his lifetime he attempted to capture the essence of nature, which earned him the admiration of the Impressionists, for whom he was a constant reference.

Located some twenty kilometers from Paris, Port-Marly — where Alfred Sisley later lived — is a village on the banks of the Seine, like Asnières, Argenteuil, Chatou, Louveciennes, Bougival and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which would very soon be made famous by the Impressionist painters. The Parc des Lions at Port-Marly, one of the most beautiful compositions from his final period, is an example of the artist’s landscape style. It was executed from life in August 1872 during a ten-day stay at the Château des Lions, owned by the Rodrigues-Henriques family since 1853.

In the painting in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Corot depicts an everyday scene in the park next to the castle featuring his host’s children, Valentine with a stick and Henri on a donkey. Two huge silver birches divide the composition into two halves and the dense undergrowth provides a protective wall, while also surrounding the clearing in the distance where what could be the outline of Saint- Germain-en-Laye can be distinguished. The composition is painted in a range of greens with a few hints of red on the boy’s smock and on the roofs in the background, while the execution, with light touches of color that make the foliage vibrate, foreshadows the first steps towards Impressionism. [Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza]

L'Albanaise (1872)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: L'Albanaise [Young Woman of Albano] 

 
Creamy skin, subtle blushing, and exotic dress complement the model who sat for The Young Woman of Albano (L'Albanaise). This teenaged girl, Mademoiselle Darmelas, also posed for Orientale Reveuse (Pensive Oriental). Albert Robaut, compiler of the 1905 Corot catalogue raisonné, observed the painter at work, in his studio, on L'Albanaise, on January 9, 1872. In Corot's shifting focus from landscape views to figure painting, a theme emerged: languid, dreamy girls who were lounging, caught in the act of reading or fantasizing, enigmatic near-smiles playing about their countenances. [Journal of the American Medical Association, 2011;305(17):1737. doi:10.1001/jama.2011.448]

Les Contrebandiers (1872)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Les Contrebandiers [The Smugglers]

Les Contrebandiers (The Smugglers) depicts two mounted riders herding a group of young horses through a verdant gorge. In the foreground, a pond reflects the stormy sky above.

Corot's lyrical landscapes were part of his self-confessed retreat from the external world. He expressed his lack of sympathy for much that was going on around him in artistic circles in a remark to Millet's biographer, Alfred Sensier, in 1857: ' This is for me a new world which I no longer recognise; I am too attached to the past...If you understand what I am saying, I want to make a new art for myself.' (quoted in Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, Histoire de Corot et ses oeuvres, Paris, 1905, p. 180).

This escapism accords perfectly with Corot's paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, be they his Salon pictures or the innumerable smaller works he also produced for an increasingly enthusiastic public. Corot was not alone in producing such ethereal visions of nature and in the 1860s there developed a considerable school of pastoral landscape painting in France, particularly in the environs of Paris, which had suffered from what some perceived to be its dehumanization on account of the pulling down of the old quartiers and construction of the grands boulevards under Baron Haussmann. [Sotheby’s]

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1871)

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Arleux-du-Nord, the Drocourt Mill, on the Sensee

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: The Fisherman's Cottage

Canal in Picardy (1865-71)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Canal in Picardy

Canal at Picardy is from the later years of Corot’s career. It features the light touch and lyric quality, plus the silver tonality that distinguishes his mature works.

The poet Baudelaire astutely observed, “Monsieur Corot is more a harmonist than a colorist and his compositions, which are always entirely free of pedantry, are seductive just because of their simplicity of color.” In this work, the finely balanced tree trunks and sky demonstrate this harmony and, though formal, are never rigid. [City Scene]

A Wagon in the Plains of Artois (1871)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: A Wagon in the Plains of Artois

This is one of five small paintings by Corot in the National Gallery thought to have been painted during the artist's trip to the Artois region of north-east France between April and July 1871. He painted this picture in May 1871 during his stay with his friend and biographer, Alfred Robaut, in Douai. [The National Gallery UK]

Corot Landscapes (1865-70)

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Cowherd and her Child

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Meadow with Two Large Trees

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Morning on the Estuary, Ville d’Avray

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Paturages Marecageux

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: The Bridge at Nantes

  

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Souvenir of Riva

  

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: The Boatmen of Mortefontaine

Diana Bathing (1869-70)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Diana Bathing (The Fountain)

According to Alfred Robaut, Corot painted this work between 1869 and 1870 in the company of Achille Oudinot (1820-1891).

Naturally, Corot is better known as a landscape painter, often associated - a little too quickly - with the Barbizon School, than as a painter of nudes. This aspect of his art was probably one of the revelations of the retrospective exhibition of 1996 held in Paris, Ottawa and New York, even though he only painted around thirty nudes, only of women, most of which are kept in public collections.

Thanks to Robaut we know that Emma Dobigny, one of Corot's favourite models, posed for this Diana Bathing. She was also known for doing some modelling for Puvis de Chavanne and Degas. Corot depicted her in many of his works, the most famous being Lady in Blue (Paris, Musée du Louvre) and appreciated in particular her vitality, while other artists criticized the fact that she could not keep still.

The rather un-anatomical style of Corot's nudes puzzled many of his colleagues, including Ingres. On the other hand, Hippolyte Flandrin found that Corot expressed something he did not find in his contemporaries. Fortunately, Corot explained his views on this subject, something he did rarely, referring to The Toilette, Landscape with Figure, undoubtedly one of his most beautiful compositions of this type: "You can see the effort I put into hiding the joints between the collarbones and the sternum, or into blending the contours of the ribs, just visible at the base of the breasts; I try to proceed differently from what is usual, that is, by showing first and foremost that I know what I am doing. Since this is not a lesson in anatomy, I have to blend, like nature does, the cover of the frame which makes up and supports the body, in order to render only what I feel in front of this flesh, through which one can see the blood running underneath, while at the same time it reflects the light of the sky. In one word, I have to put into painting those breasts the naivety I would put into painting a milk tin." These words explain beautifully, without the need for further commentary, how Corot manages to introduce emotion and poetry into such an apparently banal painting. [Museo Thyssen]

Young Women of Sparta (1868-70)

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: Young Women of Sparta

To quote Richardson: “Thanks to Corot, Picasso and Braque saw how the presence of a stringed instrument could endow a figure painting with the status of a nature morte. Corot provided the cubists with their quintessential human subject.”

He also provided them with a model for their own tonally subdued palette, a reaction in part, no doubt, against the immpressionists. As Rosenblum has pointed out, Picasso was also aware of this subject of the gypsy mandolinist through a series of picture postcards inspired by the popular nineteenth-century opera Mignon (1866), by the composer Ambroise Thomas. A number of these show the title character playing the mandolin. The romantic nature of the setting and the relaxed pose create a kitsch counterpart to Corot’s original painting. Both sources act as a thematic bridge across the high-low culture border, the crossing of which, as we have seen, was frequently an outcome of Picasso’s work.

The relationship, however, goes much deeper than just a formal connection with such artistic precedents. In Corot’s less well known painting Young Women of Sparta (1868-70), the subject of music is combined with a pose of more explicit sexual allusion. The Italian (Neapolitan) mandolin, with its distinctive round back, like its older cousin the lute and unlike the pear-shaped, flat-backed Portuguese version, is placed in the lap of the reclining figure, making clear the sexual symbolism – the womblike swelling of the back, which in the lute had been associated in the seventeenth century with the physiognomy of pregnancy, and the provocatively placed sound hole. [Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 111-112]

Woman with a Pearl (1868-70)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Woman with a Pearl

This is a totally personal transposition of the Mona Lisa. In the past the leaf on the girl's forehead was taken to be a pearl. Berthe Goldschmidt, the model, is wearing one of the Italian dresses Corot brought back from his travels abroad.

The title, which remains unexplained, seems to echo another portrait of a young woman by Jan Vermeer. There is the same enigma concerning the model, the same gaze, the same uncertainty about the costume. The blue and yellow turban in Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is described as 'Turkish', while Corot has taken his inspiration from Italian or Greek peasant dress. Then there is the pearl: readily recognizable in the Vermeer, it takes the form here of a dark-colored ornament, part of a transparent veil covering the upper part of the young woman's forehead.

Her forehead partly veiled, the young woman is seated with her forearms crossed and her hands idle. The image that at once springs to mind - except for the landscape in the background - is Leonardo's Mona Lisa. However the hairstyle, the oval face, the costume and the colors are reminiscent of Raphael. What exactly Corot's intention was here is far from easy to say. We cannot ignore the fact that until the early 19th century the Mona Lisa attracted very little attention, and that the interest underlying today's myth only appeared with the Romantic movement of around 1830. Multiple reproduction was on the rise and in response there came in 1859 the famous engraving by Calamatta. [The Louvre]

Interrupted Reading (1870)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Interrupted Reading

Interrupted Reading is among the most compelling of Camille Corot’s late figure paintings. Corot almost never exhibited these studies of the human form, preferring instead to publicize the idyllic landscapes that were his specialty. To emphasize the private nature of Interrupted Reading, Corot enclosed his model within the protective environment of the artist’s studio. The mood of the painting is introspective and somewhat melancholic, the very essence of the Romantic sensibility. The muselike image of a woman reading a book was a popular one in nineteenth-century art, but Corot chose to show his model pausing, looking up from this activity. A lover of everything Italian (he spent a number of years there), the artist often furnished his models with Italianate costumes such as the one worn here. Whereas Corot’s subject matter is traditional, his technique is not. With direct and bold brushwork, he explored the human form as a construction of masses that support and balance one another. This broad handling is complemented by the artist’s obvious delight in detail—the ribbon in the model’s hair, the delicate earrings, the deep folds in the skirt. Here he combined a profound sense of formal structure with the dreamy softness and intimacy that characterize his most famous landscapes. [Art Institute of Chicago]

The Greek Girl (ca. 1870)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: The Greek Girl

A combination of confident presence and haunted vulnerability makes this painting by Camille Corot one of the most lyrical examples of 19th-century art in America. It hangs — amid splendid company, including three Manets and a Monet — in the Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building at Vermont’s Shelburne Museum.

Corot is known as one of the greatest and most sensitive landscape painters of his time. He spent many years in Italy, where he was one of the first to take up plein air painting. His approach to light, his taste for ordinary, quotidian scenes, and his handling of paint all greatly affected the Impressionists, who came into their own soon after his death.

But Corot also painted figures, and his series of imposing but ineffably tender portraits of women, often dressed in peasant costumes, constitutes as great a contribution to French painting as his beloved landscapes.

One of the qualities that make the best of them (and The Greek Girl is among the very best) so appealing is Corot’s way with shadows. You notice this deft shadow-play all through his Italian landscapes, too, carving out palpable space and volume in pictures that would otherwise appear sun-bleached and flat.

Here, notice the way the girl’s gentle face is made all the more luminous by the dark shadows that encircle her eyes, touching also her nose, lips, and chin. Her fingers, below, are lost in darkness. But emphatic modeling in light and dark is absent from most of her costume. Only her collar and sleeve get two more sharp slivers of shadow.

Everything else about the painting is so close-toned and harmonious that these points of darkness catch you off-guard. They have, I can’t help feeling, an emotional correlative: something like the effect of simple loveliness intermittently pierced by the hidden depths that may churn up strife or lead on to love — or both.

Despite the title and the traditional folk costume, the model was not, in fact, Greek. Her name was Emma Dobigny, and she was a young French woman who posed not only for Corot but also for the younger Edgar Degas. Corot (and he was hardly alone in this in the annals of French painting), relished having his models play dress-ups. But his heart was only half in the game. He was interested in painting, in emotion and presence — not in anthropology. [The Boston Globe]

Gypsy Girl at a Fountain (1865-70)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Gypsy Girl at a Fountain

Known as a landscape painter, Camille Corot exhibited only four figure paintings during his lifetime, yet after his death more than 140 figure studies were found in his studio. Familiar to only a handful of close friends and collectors, Corot's figure paintings astonished the public when they became more widely known around 1900. Younger generations of artists, including Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso, admired and recognized them as some of the most progressive figural paintings of the nineteenth century. Edgar Degas once admitted that he thought Corot even better in his figures than his landscapes, and Mary Cassatt advised American collectors to purchase these rather than Corot's landscapes. Made after 1859, when Corot was troubled by gout and could no longer travel, the studies are remarkable for being studio compositions. Employing young Italian women who lived in his neighborhood as models and using costumes and props in his collection, Corot painted exquisite portraits set in romantic Italian landscapes. Gypsy Girl at a Fountain, with its gentle, creamy brushwork, is a sumptuously painted picture of a woman paused in a moment of reverie. [Philadelphia Museum of Art]

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1869)

 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: A Woman Reading in a Landscape

  

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Nantes, the Cathedral 

and the City Seen through the Trees