Drawings by Corot, Loaned by Goodman-Walker, Inc., Boston, MA, February 8-March 7, 1931

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born in Paris on July 16, 1796 to a bourgeois family. His father was a wigmaker and his mother a milliner, their shop was a famous destination for fashionable Parisians.

Corot received a scholarship to study in Rouen, but left after having scholastic difficulties and entered a boarding school. Unlike many masters who demonstrated early talent and inclinations toward art, before 1815 Corot showed no such interest. When Corot's parents moved into a new residence in 1817, the twenty-one year old Corot moved into the dormer-windowed room on the third floor, which became his first studio as well.

With his father's help he apprenticed to a draper where he remained until he was 26, when his father consented to his adopting the profession of art. Perhaps out of boredom, he turned to oil painting around 1821 and began immediately with landscapes.

For a short period between 1821-1822, Corot studied with Achille-Etna Michallon. Michallon exposed him to the principles of the French Neoclassical tradition. After Michallon's early death in 1822, Corot studied with Michallon's teacher, Jean-Victor Bertin, among the best known Neoclassical landscape painters in France. Though holding Neoclassicists in the highest regard, Corot did not limit his training to their tradition of allegory set in imagined nature. His notebooks reveal precise renderings of tree trunks, rocks, and plants which show the influence of Northern realism.

With his parents' support, Corot went to Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance and to draw the crumbling monuments of Roman antiquity. Corot's stay in Italy from 1825 to 1828 was a highly formative and productive one, during which he completed over 200 drawings and 150 paintings.

During the six-year period following his first Italian visit and his second, Corot focused on preparing large landscapes for presentation at the Salon. Several of his salon paintings were adaptations of his Italian oil sketches reworked in the studio by adding imagined, formal elements consistent with Neoclassical principles. In his first Salon entry, View at Narni (1827), he took his quick, natural study of a ruin of a Roman aqueduct in dusty bright sun and transformed it into an falsely idyllic pastoral setting with giant shade trees and green lawns, a conversion meant to appeal to the Neoclassical jurors. Many critics valued his plein-air Italian paintings highly for their "germ of Impressionism."

His first critical success came in the 1835 Salon in response to his biblical painting Agar dans le desert (Hagar in the Wilderness). Through the 1840's, Corot continued to have his troubles with the critics, nor were many works purchased by the public. While recognition and acceptance came slowly, by 1845, Baudelaire led a charge, pronouncing Corot the leader in the ""modern school of landscape painting."" In 1846, the French government decorated him with the cross of the Légion d'Honneur and in 1848 he was awarded a second-class medal at the Salon. Corot's public treatment dramatically improved after the Revolution of 1848, when he was admitted as a member of the Salon jury. He was promoted to an officer of the Salon in 1867.

Having forsaken any long-term relationships with women, Corot remained very close to his parents even in his fifties. Apart from his frequent travels, Corot remained closely tethered to his family until his parents died. He then began teaching informal lessons to students. Future Impressionist Camille Pissarro was briefly among them.

By the mid-1850s, Corot's increasingly impressionistic style began to get the recognition that fixed his place in French art. In the 1860's, Corot was still mixing peasant figures with mythological ones, mixing Neoclassicism with Realism. In later life, Corot's studio was filled with students, models, friends, collectors, and dealers who snapped up his works and his prices were often above 4,000 francs per painting. With his success secured, Corot gave generously of his money and time. He became an elder of the artists' community and would use his influence to gain commissions for other artists. Corot died in Paris on February 22, 1875.

Source: Wikipedia contributors. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot [Internet]. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; 2022 March 23, 12:24 UTC [cited 2022 April 28]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean-Baptiste-Camille_Corot&oldid=1078806017.