Birth Year : 1796
Death Year : 1875
Country : France
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, the first of the great modern landscapists,
was born in Paris. The son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Corot was a businessman
before he became, at the age of twenty-six, an artist. Consequently, he
was able to paint without the necessity of selling his work. After a period
of study with two academic painters, Corot went to Italy in 1825 where
he spent two years roaming the countryside outside Rome as had Claude Lorrain
two centuries before. Unlike Claude, however, Corot did not sketch; he
painted directly from nature upon small canvases, observing carefully,
translating his visual experiences directly and concentrating on architectural
clarity and the play of light upon volume. This process led to an entirely
new concept of landscape painting. Corot kept his discoveries to himself,
however, and sent only Neoclassical landscapes to the Paris Salons.
In 1828 he returned to France to paint in the soft, gentle light of
the Ile-de-France, near Paris. In this period, Corot produced a group of
hazy landscapes with misty grays veiling nature's color, an effect achieved
by overpainting while his underpainting was still wet. This was a revolutionary
step that led further along the path followed by the Impressionists. Corot
continued to paint in almost entire obscurity and it was not until 1848
that it became known that he also painted figures with an exquisite poetic
grace. By 1855, his work was in great demand and he was able, because of
his private income and his position on the admissions jury for the Salons,
to assist many young and struggling artists, either by gifts of money or
by signing his name to canvases by those less fortunate than he was.
Corot painted more than three thousand works: small sketches and paintings
from nature done in Italy, France, Switzerland, and Holland; large Salon
works on historical themes; figure paintings and; and after 1850, landscapes
painted from memory in the misty green tonality with which his name is
associated. Corot's influence upon modern art was profound for he was the
first to study nature and so was able to give his works that quality of
the real that comes from direct and immediate visual experience.
|
|
Jean-Baptiste
Camille Corot
Quai
des Paquis, Geneva
Jean-Baptiste
Camille Corot
Girl
in Beret
Jean-Baptiste
Camille Corot
Ville
D'avray
Jean-Baptiste
Camille Corot
Ville
D'Avray
Jean-Baptiste
Camille Corot
Souvenir
de Mortefontaine
View
all Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Books about Corot |
