Details

Name

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot

Brief Biography

1796 - 1875, French

Occupation

Artist

Description

Corot was the most versatile and successful French landscape painter of the first half of the 19th century. Renoir considered him to be the ‘ great genius of the century… He was called a poet. But what a misnomer! He was a naturalist. I have studied him ceaselessly without ever being able to approach his art.’ Corot was born into a comfortable bourgeois family, his father a cloth-merchant and his mother the proprietor of a thriving hat business. Corot’s youthful friendship with Michallon, the first winner of the Prix de Rome in landscape painting, confirmed his ambitions to become a painter himself. He studied with the classicising painters Michallon and Bertin, visiting Italy for the first time in the autumn of 1825 when he painted views of the Forum and Colosseum. Corot’s Salon pictures reveal his respect for the classical landscape tradition, rather than the northern Dutch landscapes favoured by the Barbizon School.

On his return from Italy he worked in many regions of France, especially the Forest of Fontainebleau. There were two further visits to Italy in 1834 and 1843, and he also visited Switzerland, Holland and England. He was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1846 and became a member of the Salon jury in 1848. Although many aspects of his art anticipated Impressionism he remained devoted to the Salon and the ideals it embodied. His first biographer, Etienne Moreau-Nelaton wrote in 1905 that :’Corot never broke with tradition. Whereas Rousseau and Dupré deliberately set free aesthetics and renounced all attachment to the Possinesque French landscape of the past, Corot never burned his bridges and, always going to nature for his inspiration, remained exactly faithful to the formula of his artistic ancestors. He accomplished this tour de force by being at the same time the last of the classical landscapists and the first of the Impressionists.’