Camille Corot - The Ponds of Ville D’Avray

Camille Corot - The Ponds of Ville D’Avray, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Portland Art Museum, Oregon - Oil on canvas, 52 x 81 cm]

Camille Corot - River with a Distant Tower [1865]

Camille Corot - River with a Distant Tower [1865], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The writer Théophile Thoré repeated his habitual criticism of Corot in 1865, the date of this picture: "Corot almost never made anything besides the same one landscape, but it is good." The landscape here was created by Corot in his studio from stock elements that he knew by heart: the cluster of silvery trees, the body of leaden water, the peasant figures and boatman, the distant tower. Like his idol Claude Lorrain, Corot could generate a landscape and a mood through the power of his imagination.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 54.6 x 78.4 cm]

Camille Corot - Forest of Fontainebleau [1834]

Camille Corot - Forest of Fontainebleau [1834], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The impressionist style developed as a method to render more accurately the appearance of the natural world, and was principally a technique for landscape painting. Corot, whose career began in the late 1820s when the academic tradition of landscape painting was being revived, was one of the most prolific and influential exponents of the genre. Forest of Fontainebleau, painted for and exhibited at the Salon of 1834, is a historic landscape, the hybrid category devised to elevate the status of landscape painting by combining with it the subjects of history painting. Although Corot's principal subject here was landscape, contemporaries readily identified the reclining woman in the foreground as Mary Magdalene. Her unbound hair and peasant costume, the deer in the background, and her solitude in the wilderness are traditional attributes of the saint.

In accord with academic training, Forest of Fontainebleau was created in the studio on the basis of sketches and studies that had been painted outdoors. The artist's humble attitude toward nature, unostentatious compositions, responsive paint handling, and conscientious clarity and freshness of vision distinguish his work from the formulaic landscapes of academic contemporaries. Corot declined to participate in the first impressionist exhibition, but his pervasive influence was manifest in works by pupils and followers including Pissarro, Morisot, Renoir, Monet, and Sisley.

[National Gallery of Art, Washington - Oil on canvas, 175.6 x 242.6 cm]

Camille Corot - Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in Her Bath) [1836]

Camille Corot - Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in Her Bath) [1836], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Diana and Actaeon is one of Corot's earliest treatments of a subject from ancient mythology. In representing a classical subject in an Arcadian landscape, Corot was responding to the example of Poussin, the greatest French master of the seventeenth century. The section of landscape at the upper left, executed in the loose brushwork and silvery palette of Corot's late style, was repainted by the artist in 1874, one year before his death, at the request of the painting's new owner.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 156.5 x 112.7 cm]

Camille Corot - The House and Factory of Monsieur Henry [1833]

Camille Corot - The House and Factory of Monsieur Henry [1833], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Monsieur Henry, a cloth manufacturer and a friend of the artist’s father, commissioned this picture of his house and factory in Soissons, France. Corot also painted a view from the back of the house overlooking the spires of Soissons Cathedral; this painting is now in Otterlo, Holland. Regarding Corot as an amateur, Henry neglected to pay him for works that are now considered among the finest of the artist’s early career.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, 81.4 x 100.3 cm]

Camille Corot - Landscape with Lake and Boatman [1839]

Camille Corot - Landscape with Lake and Boatman [1839], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

After a long day, a solitary boatman poles his boat ashore across the water's placid surface. An array of colours, citron, lavender, turquoise, and rose, fills the sky as the sun slowly sets. Light reflects against the trees, turning the edges and foliage yellow-orange; the pool of water shimmers with reflections. The dramatically colored backlighting and the tiny, lone man create a sense of melancholy and longing that appealed to the Romantic critics of the time.

Composing from memories and from drawings made during his travels in Italy, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painted this view for the Paris Salon of 1839. It may be a pendant to Italian Landscape, which he painted the same year. Until they were offered to the Getty Museum in 1984, scholars thought both paintings were lost. The two paintings depict ideal Italian views that contrast different times of day, emulating the works of Corot's seventeenth-century countryman Claude Lorrain. 

[Oil on canvas, 24.625 x 40.5 inches]

Camille Corot - Bacchante by the Sea [1865]

Camille Corot - Bacchante by the Sea [1865], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In his study of Corot, the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe extolled the series of Odalisques that the artist painted throughout his career, beginning in 1837: "The progressive development of his Odalisques continued until he was past sixty; a development not of a type but of the painting. . . . In the course of fifty years, this figure seems to grow and take on broader, more majestic contours. The forms become rounder, the limbs learn movement, the flesh becomes more elastic and finally, perfected beauty emerges. His women painted in the sixties take on a brilliant loveliness." Corot exhibited this work, along with another, also of a reclining nude, at the 1865 Paris Salon.

[Oil on wood, 38.7 x 59.4 cm]

Camille Corot - View of Lormes Early [1840s]

Camille Corot - View of Lormes Early [1840s], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This rapidly executed sketch, made outdoors, is one of several views of the countryside and villages in the Morvan, a mountainous region south of Paris, that Corot painted in the early 1840s.

[Oil on canvas, 16.5 x 54.9 cm]

Camille Corot - Marietta, the Roman Odalisque

Camille Corot - Marietta, the Roman Odalisque, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Marietta poses in the studio of Achille Benouville which Corot used during his third and last trip to Rome. Worked in smears and showing the initial layout of the pencil, the work is a subtle variation of pink ochre, brown, white and pale green.

[Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 29.3 x 44.2 cm]

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - A Wagon in the Plains of Artois [1871]

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - A Wagon in the Plains of Artois [1871], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

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.

[Oil on canvas, 37.3 x 35.2 cm]

Camille Corot - Hauteurs de Sèvres, Chemin Troyon

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Paris, July 17, 1796 – Paris, February 22, 1875) was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

In later life, Corot’s studio was filled with students, models, friends, collectors, and dealers who came and went under the tolerant eye of the master, causing him to quip, “Why is it that there are ten of you around me, and not one of you thinks to relight my pipe.” Dealers snapped up his works and his prices were often above 4,000 francs per painting. With his success secured, Corot gave generously of his money and time. He became an elder of the artists’ community and would use his influence to gain commissions for other artists. In 1871 he gave £2000 for the poor of Paris, under siege by the Prussians. During the actual Paris Commune he was at Arras with Alfred Robaut. In 1872 he bought a house in Auvers as a gift for Honoré Daumier, who by then was blind, without resources, and homeless. In 1875 he donated 10.000 francs to the widow of Millet in support of her children. His charity was near proverbial. He also financially supported the upkeep of a day centre for children on rue Vandrezanne in Paris. In later life, he remained a humble and modest man, apolitical and happy with his luck in life, and held close the belief that, “men should not puff themselves up with pride, whether they are emperors adding this or that province to their empires or painter who gain a reputation.

He died in Paris of a stomach disorder aged 78 and was buried at Père Lachaise.

[Oil on canvas, 23.5 × 36.8 cm]