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Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
(Jul. 16, 1796 Fr.- Feb. 22, 1875 Fr.) French Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, started attending evening classes at the atelier Suisse at the age of 19. He also had a studio built in the country house of his father at near Versailles. At the age of 26 he abandoned a commercial career for art and from the first showed a strong vocation for landscape oil painting. His skills with a paint brush were hard won, but his incomparable eye for subtle color variation seems to have been inborn. He lived in Paris, but traveled around France making sketches from nature and from these he composed the finished oil paintings in his art studio. In addition to his journeys in France, he visited England, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Italy three times (1825-28, 1834, and 1843). Throughout his life Corot found the advice given to him by his teacher Achille-Etna Michallon "to reproduce as scrupulously as possible what I saw in front of me". On the other hand he never felt entirely at home with the ideals of the Barbizon School, the members of which saw Romantic idealization of the countryside as a form of escapism from urban banality and he remained more faithful to the French Classical tradition than to the English or Dutch schools. Yet although he continued to make studied compositions after his sketches done direct from nature, he brought a new and personal vision in the Classical tradition of composed landscape and an unaffected naturalness which had hitherto been foreign to it. Through he represented nature realistically, he did not idealize the peasant or the labors of agriculture and was uninvolved in ideological controversy.
From 1827 Corot exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon, but his greatest success there came with a rather different type of painting, more traditionally Romantic in its evocation of an Arcadian past and painted in a misty soft-edged style that contrasts sharply with the luminous clarity of his more topographical work.
Corot was in his late thirties when he won his first medal at the Salon of 1833. At the Salon of 1835, he exhibited Hagar in the Wilderness (New York, Metropolitan Museum), a highly original historical landscape of great ambition. In 1847 he was awarded the medal of the Legion d'Honneur. At the 1850-51 Salon, Dance of the Nymphs was purchased by the state and shown at the Paris Musée d'Orsay. His Souvenir of Mortefontaine (1864, Musée du Louvre, Paris) 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. 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 oil painting. His oil paintings were shown by Durand-Ruel in London and in numerous exhibitions in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere. His growing popularity helped draw attention to naturalism. In 1870 Corot was elected a member of the Salon jury. During the Franco-Prussian War he donated big sums of money for his country defense
Late in his career Corot also turned to figure painting and it is only fairly recently that this aspect of his work has emerged from neglect, his female nudes are often of high quality. It was his directness of vision that was generally admired by the major landscape oil painters of the latter half of the 19th century and influenced nearly all of them at some stage of their careers. His popularity was, and is, such that he is said to be the most forged of all painters, this in addition to an already prolific output. In his lifetime he was held in great esteem as a man as well as an artist, for he had a noble and generous nature; he supported Millet's widow and gave a cottage to the blind and impoverished Daumier.
Corot's landscapes are among the most sought after and influential oil paintings of the 19th 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 oil painting, the elevation of the plein-air sketch to the status of finished studio paintings.
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House by the Water
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Windmill on the Cote de Picardie
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Goatherd and Village
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Town and Lake Como
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