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]

Bather (1870)

William Bouguereau: Bather

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]

An Arab Sheikh (1870)

Léon Bonnat: An Arab Sheikh

In 1868-69, Bonnat accompanied Jean-Léon Gérôme on a tour of Egypt and the Holy Land. During the trip, he made a number of sketches, which he used as the basis for paintings after he returned to Paris. Bonnat was an influential teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and included among his pupils Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Thomas Eakins. A bearded Arab in a crimson caftan and a striped beige burnoose is seated on a carpet holding a sword in one hand and resting his elbow on a divan. Behind him is a saddle. [The Walters Art Museum]

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]

Dionysia (1870)

Pierre-Auguste Cot: Dionysia

Cliffs at Etretat (1870)

Gustave Courbet: Cliffs at Etretat