COROT, Jean-Baptiste Camille

Seen slightly from below as she leans on a stone balustrade, the figure of a young Italian woman rises monumentally and with well-nigh classical statuesqueness against an atmospherically diaphanous background, consisting of a rocky slope with farmhouses, a tree trunk cut off at the right edge of the canvas, and a predominant sky dotted with small, gold-tinged clouds. The dense blue and black hues of the woman’s garments set the figure off markedly from the background ambience.

The dignified and serious basic mood of the picture is concentrated above all in the melancholy, shaded eye area of the face. The Italian costume, exquisite pearl necklace, and especially the noble facial features framed by wonderfully arranged black hair, exude a classical dignity, as if some figure of ancient legend had suddenly materialized before our eyes. She embodies the land of longing, Italy, and the charm of that intermingling of classical grandeur and subjective mood which every Romantic current in art again and again sought in the Mediterranean world.

Toward the end of his life Corot revived the theme of the painter’s studio: a model posing, or a gathering of connoisseurs or artists. In a few instances he depicted a young girl seated in front of one of his own pictures, contemplative, or lost in reverie.

It is assumed by some experts that this landscape, painted in a studio, represents the Lake Albano, near Rome in Italy.

Emma Dobigny, one of Corot’s favourite models, posing in Greek garb, is said to have inspired this melancholy figure. The title of the work may refer to the heroine of Byron’s poem Don Juan, or to one of the women loved by the Count of Monte-Cristo in the homonymous novel by Alexandre Dumas. Alternatively, since Corot had a passion for music, it may refer to the heroine of Auber’s opera Hayd�e or the Secret.

Corot’s landscapes are brightened by a calm, diffuse Mediterranean light that imbues them with contemplative serenity and a feeling of timelessness.

This painting is probably a portrait of one of Corot’s friends visiting his studio which can be identified by the landscape of France and the view of Italy on the wall. But the painting is first and foremost a pure exercise in painterly skills, with the red tip of the fan set off against the blue fabric of the dress, and the cushions contrasting the luminous flesh of the woman’s arm, with a slanting line formed by the leg of the easel enhancing the subtle balance of horizontals and verticals.

This painting from the late period of the artist was painted in northern France when he was a guest at the house of his friend, Robaut, not far from Arras.

The austere yet in exhaustible range of silvery grey hues, together with the combination of a single mass of forest and lightly drawn tree, makes this painting characteristic of Corot’s oeuvre. The figures in his late works appear to dissolve into nature. Here, the turn of the woman’s body is presented so precisely that the entire landscape seems to be contained within her backward glance.

Corot’s ‘studies’ painted outdoors directly from the motif were private works and were not exhibited by him at the Paris Salons. They were none the less formative on generations of artists, having been bought up after Corot’s death by fellow-painters, including Degas. A late developer, inspired by Constable’s landscapes exhibited at the Salon of 1824, fortunate to be supported and encouraged by his parents, Corot became one of the most unassuming revolutionaries in the history of art. He is the agent of change from the severely stylised French ‘ideal landscape’ tradition derived from Poussin and Claude to modern landscape painting, finding classical peace and harmony in the face of nature itself.

This canvas was painted in the Morvan, a district west of Dijon in Burgundy, which Corot visited frequently on painting expeditions in the early 1840s. His father’s family had originated there, and he must have felt a particular affinity with the region. A peasant saws timber; his wife helps him. Trees and distant village buildings are silhouetted against the sky, irradiated with the fresh cool light of early morning, and long shadows fall on the grass, where we can just make out a glint of white plumage on the back of a goose with dun-feathered wings waddling out to graze.

Corot was one of the principal representatives of French Realist landscape painting, and a precursor of Impressionism. He was already 76 when he completed this painting, which synthesizes the most important features of his art. His work was outstanding in its time, and in its desire to depict nature truthfully was an important forerunner of what was to come.

The pendant of this painting (Rosny, near Paris: View of the Village in Spring) is also in the Louvre.

This self-portrait may be the one Corot reportedly painted at his parents’ request before leaving for a study trip to Italy in 1825. His views of Italy, in which he strove to capture the effects of light, represent a capital phase in his own painting and in the evolution of landscape painting as a whole.

Corot spent his time between making studies from life all over France, and doing studio work that he intended to exhibit. In keeping with the tradition of history painting, in the studio he recomposed views from the open-air studies and animated them with figures sketched on his outings or during sittings. In the 1840s, Corot sought to transform the “impressions” captured during his outdoor work into full-fledged landscapes, which he steeped in a sentimental, poetic mood. In this way he invented the idea of “souvenir”. Here his recollection of the English-style park of the Chateau de Mortefontaine in the Oise provided the inspiration foe a marvellous evocation of the universal theme of gathering.

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1864.

Corot, who devoted his entire artistic study trip in Italy to landscape - and allegedly spent little time at all in the museums - was profoundly affected by the Roman countryside he visited in 1826. While in the town of Narni he sketched a view of the ruined bridge of Augustus over the Nera river. The following year Corot would use this oil sketch capturing his first impression for a full size composition painted in his studio, and then shown at the Salon of 1827 (now in the National Gallery, Ottawa).

In 1828 Corot returned to France from Italy and painted the Cathedral of Chartres in 1830.Its highly original framing and luminosity follow up his experiments in Italy. The artist reworked this painting in 1872.

The pendants The Coliseum Seen from the Farnese Gardens and The Forum Seen from the Farnese Gardens were chosen by Corot himself to represent his work in the Louvre after his death. For him the trip to Rome had meant the discovery of the luminosity of Mediterranean sites, rather than the traces of ancient classical culture. The two views, painted outdoors in the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine Hill, are not so much “portraits” of the monuments, as investigations of the interplay of volumes and coloured planes, and the effects of the sun’s rays on the fa�ades, roofs and foliage. During his stay in Rome, Corot did a great number of technical experiments, hoping to render in paint what he was seeing.

The pendants The Coliseum Seen from the Farnese Gardens and The Forum Seen from the Farnese Gardens were chosen by Corot himself to represent his work in the Louvre after his death. For him the trip to Rome had meant the discovery of the luminosity of Mediterranean sites, rather than the traces of ancient classical culture. The two views, painted outdoors in the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine Hill, are not so much “portraits” of the monuments, as investigations of the interplay of volumes and coloured planes, and the effects of the sun’s rays on the fa�ades, roofs and foliage. During his stay in Rome, Corot did a great number of technical experiments, hoping to render in paint what he was seeing.

Besides landscapes, Corot worked in the studio on studies from life. The male friends or young girls who modelled for him varied their poses during the sittings, as Corot made numerous sketches, and then selected an attitude or expression that he could use later in a full composition, thereby blending realism with feeling and allegory. Thus transfigured, his models become archetypes, allegorical figures, and deities. In this painting the model has been transformed into a barefoot Muse deeply absorbed in a book, her head wreathed in flowers.

The Barbizon School played an outstanding role in the history of modern landscape painting. This was a group of young artists who in the 1830s and 40s sought the beauties of the unsullied landscape, a rural idyll, the un dramatic yet inspirited ‘paysage intime’ in the forest of Fontainebleau. They finally settled in the village of Barbizon, where they were occasionally joined by Camille Corot, the major artist of the group.

Corot’s works embody the essence of a landscape painting of airily rendered, basically ordinary scenes populated now and then with mythological figures. These were alternative images to an economically and touristically exploited nature. Inspiration came from seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes and those of the Englishman John Constable, but especially from the new turn to open-air painting and its capturing of atmospheric, evanescent effects. This notwithstanding, Corot generally finished his works in the studio. Using a limited range of colour, especially earthy greens, a silvery gray, ocher and their gradations, contrasted with a bright sky, Corot engendered a lovely, melodious harmony that clothed nature in a Late Romantic, magical mood.

In The Solitude, the artist has done without all mythological trappings. A female figure, reclining and as if lost in thought, is sufficient to lend this, one of the Barbizon master’s most elegiac landscapes, an incomparable mood of loneliness and yearning.

This picture is one of the depersonalised figures that Corot painted in the third part of his career. The position and the expression of the sitter, Berthe Goldschmidt, posing in an Italian dress that Corot had brought back with him, is almost a pastiche of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The small leaf standing out on the young girl’s brow, formerly thought to be a pearl, gave the picture its title.

In his last years, Corot painted several figures. In these paintings the sitter, occasionally a friend posing in the studio, is relocated in a sweet poetic world that reflects the personality of the person portrayed. In such cases the subject becomes an archetype or an allegory, and often appears immersed in a deep reverie. Corot sometimes completes the metamorphoses of his model by subsequently giving the picture a title borrowed from literature, as is the case in Vall�da, the heroine of Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs.

Throughout his adult life, Corot spent part of each year at the family property in Ville-d’Avray in the environs of Paris. The landscapes painted there in the 1860s and 1870s - views of wooded glades delicately modeled in dull greens, browns, and an exquisite range of silvery grays, all veiled in misty light - won him considerable success during his lifetime.

From his second Italian journey in 1834 Corot brought back landscapes permeated by an astonishing luminosity, in particular those of Volterra and Venice. These faithful sketches taken from nature were subsequently reworked in the studio or kept as mementos for later compositions executed from memory.