Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (b. 16 July 1796, Paris, First French Republic - d. 22 February 1875, Paris, Île-de-France, France) was the greatest French landscape painter of the 19th century. Camille Corot is the painter who freed landscape painting from the restrictions imposed by neoclassicism.
He was a master of plein-air painting and therefore influenced Impressionism, a movement he witnessed but did not fully understand. Corot can be considered the forerunner of Impressionism.
Jean-Baptiste_Camille Corot's Biography
Camille Corot was born on 16 July 1796 at half past one in Paris, the son of Louis-Jacques Corot and Marie-Françoise Oberson, owners of a fashion house.
On 15 December 1796 Corot was awarded a national scholarship, which secured him entry to the Lycée de Rouen in April 1807. On 29 June 1812 his parents withdrew him from the college to enrol him in a boarding school in Poissy. Corot, a pupil in the primary school, shows a waning interest in learning.
In 1814 he returned to Paris and was employed as a clerk in the shop of the merchant Ratier. In 1815, he went into the service of Monsieur Delalain, a postman in rue St. Honoré ("You'll never have the genius for business," his employer told him).
At 26, he abandoned a promising career as a merchant in favour of art, showing from the start a strong vocation for landscape painting. Mr Corot, though very sceptical of Camille's talent, gave him an annual income of 1,500 francs, allowing him to pursue his painting in peace. In the same year, Camille entered the studio of Achille Michallon, a disciple of David.
Later, referring to a study he was working on under his supervision, the painter would say: "It is more a study of obedience than of painting". Soon, however, Michallon died and Corot was taken in by the deceased's teacher, Victor Bertin, a staunch supporter of the historical, antiquarian landscape. Corot did not share his way of painting.
In November 1825, Camille Corot makes his first trip to Italy. He visited Rome and its surroundings (Viterbo, Narni). In 1827 he sent two landscapes from Rome to the annual Salon in Paris. In the spring of 1828 Corot visits Naples, Ischia, Capri and returns to France via Venice.
In 1831 at the Louvre Exhibition, Corot shows four canvases that critics describe as "flat."
In 1833, he exhibits Magdalene in Prayer for which he is awarded a medal. Philippe Burty considers that this work marks the definitive break with the historical landscape and the apogee of Corot's first style. The following year he exhibits three canvases at the annual Salon.
In 1834 he makes a second trip to Italy (Genoa, Pisa, Volterra, Florence, Venice and the Italian lakes). He continues to exhibit at all the Annual Salons.
In 1839, at the annual Salon, Corot exhibited Evening, which was to inspire Theophile Gautier's verse:
But behold the dusk from the heights descends;
And the shadow, ever more dense, through the valleys unfolds;
The clear skies are fading into warm tones.
With heavy eyes the sunset goes to bed.
The crickets are silent; through the deep stillness
Only the sighing of water travelling through the meadow.
All the universe sleeps, and the hours of silence
Weaves moistened with evening tears;
In the darkest corner, under the fading ray,
Corot, your modest name, is scarcely distinguishable.
In 1842 Corot presented the Salon with five canvases, of which the jury admitted only two.
In May-August 1843 he makes his third and last trip to Italy, to Rome and its surroundings.
Carot approaches the etching technique (1845) (Memories of Tuscany). For his View of the Fontainbleu Forest he receives the Cross of the Legion of Honour (1846). In 1848 the Salon receives all nine of his proposed works. He is even elected to the Jury (ninth with 353 votes).
In 1851 he visits England. At the Duke of Westminster's gallery he is particularly impressed by Raphael and Hobbema. Apparently it was after this visit that the painter decided to lower the horizon in his landscapes.
In 1855, the annual Salon was merged with the Universal Exhibition. Corot is one of the 34 members of the Jury, appointed by Napoleon III himself.
In 1858, a misit, Mr. Boussaton, suggested that he hold a sale of paintings to survey public preferences. Corot hesitated (he was not in the habit of selling his works, and when forced to do so, he would take them back at the first opportunity). He finally agreed. He sells 38 canvases for 14,233 francs. The mysite is far from satisfied, but Corot finds the sum enormous.
In 1861 Corot illustrated in etching the poems that Edmond Roche had dedicated to him before his death. In 1865 he was to receive a medal of honour, but his application was rejected because he was not a "peintre d'histoire", as the official taste demanded.
This failure saddened him less than the death in the same year of his friend Dutilleux, his first buyer, who was also his pupil. In 1866 he exhibited two paintings and an etching at the Salon. He falls ill with gout.
In 1867 he takes part in the Universal Exhibition. He is awarded a medal, but with a second medal, and instead receives the title of Officer of the Legion of Honour. From then on Corot enjoyed increasing popularity.
In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Corot wants to go to the front; he even buys weapons. But old age held him back. But he works to get the money to help the troops. He donates a large sum "to make the cannons needed to drive the Prussians out of Ville D'Avray" - a town he has always cared about.
On 11 July 1872, Corot is celebrated; he travels around the country. In 1874, he was again to receive a medal of honour. Instead, however, a certain Gérôme received it. The old man is saddened. His admirers organise a banquet.
On 22 February 1875, at half past eleven in the evening, Corot dies. Two days later the funeral takes place at Père-Lachaise cemetery. After the mass - L. Roger-Milès reports - during which the Requiem prozodiat was played, according to the wishes of the deceased, on the well-known andante from Beethoven's Symphony in A, M. de Chennvières, director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, gave a very eloquent speech.
But far more significant was the "speech" of a local woman: on the way from the house in Faubourg-Poissonière to the church of Saint Laurent, someone asked whose funeral it was and was told, "I don't know his name, but he's a good man."
A commemorative exhibition is held at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (128 works are on display). A posthumous auction of his paintings takes place from May to June. 600 works are sold for 2,000,000 francs.
Work of Jean-Baptiste_Camille Corot
- La Cathédrale de Chartres (1830) (Louvre Museum, Paris)
- Concert champêtre (1844)
- Une Matinée (A Morning) (1850) (Louvre Museum)
- Macbeth (1859), in the Wallace Collection
- Le Lac (The Lake) (1861)
- Souvenir de Mortefontaine (Memory of Mortefontaine) (1864) (Louvre Museum)
- L'Arbre brisé (1865)
- Pastoral - Souvenir d'Italie (1873)
- Biblis (1875)
Quote
"Beauty in art is truth, bathed in the impression that an aspect of nature has given you. I am not one of those artists who work on fragments. My aim is to express life. I need a model that really lives. "
Jean-Baptiste_Camille Corot's Critical Appreciation
Henri Focillon
"In the dark and contradictory universe of Romanticism, Corot's works appear to us as the image at once classical and modern of an art that owes little to contemporaneity. And yet, only the 19th century could give a Corot."
Gustave Geffroy
"The story of Corot's life is spread throughout the world. You can find it in public museums, in collectors' galleries, in any salon or room where there is a painting. You can find it in France, in Europe, in America.
This story is his work, his canvases full of light, in which water, grass, trees, clouds, high sunsets and tired sunsets, the presentiment or nostalgia of the sun, the gentleness of the moon and the stars, the silvery reflections of the night and the silence welcome you. Each of these canvases speaks for Corot, it tells us:
'That day, that morning, that evening or that night, I was here, facing this lake, this belt of trees, this plain, these houses; I was here, under this sad sky, wet with rain. I saw the divine smile of light pass over the grey face of nature".
Other canvases, portraits, will make other confessions: "They are often humble girls, humble women. I met them on the street... in their maids' costumes and I recognized in them all the beauties of life.
I have seen the poem of the hours unfold in their flesh. The mystery of the trees rested in their hair; in their eyes they bore the sky and the waters. Spring and autumn passed unceasingly before me, as they smiled with joy or sadness. and their ingenuous words made me see the dances of nymphs."
Émile Zola
"If Monsieur Corot would consent to kill once and for all the nymphs with which he populates his forests, replacing them with peasants, I would love him beyond measure. I know that these delicate foliage and this blushing, smiling atmosphere are suited to diaphanous creatures, vaporous dreams. That's why I'm tempted to ask the master for a more human, more vigorous nature."
J. F. Raffaelli
"A painting by Corot puts us in touch with the supreme human beauty: of body and spirit alike. He is neither a demigod like Raphael, nor a sorcerer like Rembrandt, nor a titan like Michelangelo, an alchemist like Dürer or a gentleman like Velázquez; he is simply human, and that is enough."
Léonce Bénédite
"What distinguishes this incomparable magician from the Impressionists, who took from him the careful analysis of light sensations and atmosphere, is that he always remains an idealist. By his voluptuous serenity, by the grandeur of his melodious pantheism, by the Virgilian hold of his dreaminess, Corot, prepares and heralds the landscapes of Puvis de Chavannes and Cazin."
Jacques Baschet
"In a museum room, Corot's paintings don't hold us like other works: they appear to us like a fragment of a dream that escapes thought. His painting cannot be judged; it catches you, it draws you in, it takes you away, into a land of soft shadows, where nymphs dwell and whose horizons are bathed in misty blues.
And how sketchily wrought this work seems! Indeed, any visible effort would have paralysed the grace and poise of a nature which, until Corot, seems to have refused the gaze. There is here a splendid assurance of craftsmanship. And there is also a confident, honest soul (...) ready at any time for any sacrifice."
Pierre Courthion
"Everything Corot painted, down to the smallest sketches, is imbued with happiness. It is not the happiness of a credulous man; it is an acquired one: the happiness of the man who looks at and recognises himself in what has preceded him as well as what will follow.
Claude Gellée, La Fontaine (and before that Theocritus) knew this state of waiting, this nostalgia of one who lives between a lost homeland and a promised land. In Corot's world everything is always forgiven. Not a trace of hatred.
Through love, everything is enlightened, everything yields to magnanimity. Man exists to please others. Yesterday's, as well as later, are equally contained in the present - a present in which the state of suffering is overcome. Everything twists like a flower - towards the light. Corot is a vocation.
His youth and maturity are expressed in the same drawing. Man is fulfilled outside of experience, painting again and again - without much external variety - his own portrait or landscape. And it is enough for him to touch only the matter, for the simplest image to rise, under his fingers, to the dimension of the sublime. Corot is the painter who sings."
