Age of Revolution
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875)
French Barbizon School painter.
Camille Corot, born in Paris in 1796 to a prosperous milliner and a cloth merchant, came late to painting and then outlived almost every rival of his generation. After a brief apprenticeship in trade he studied with Achille-Etna Michallon and Jean-Victor Bertin, inheriting the classical landscape tradition of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes: compose in the studio, but study light outdoors.
Three sojourns in Italy, beginning in 1825, formed him. In the Roman Campagna he painted small oil studies of bridges, aqueducts, and open ground in a single sitting — among the most direct outdoor oils of the 1820s. Peter Galassi has shown how those Italian studies sit between academic classical landscape and the later Barbizon habit of working from nature. Back in France he became a quiet center of the Barbizon circle, painting the ponds of Ville-d'Avray, silvery trees, and, in later decades, a long series of women in studio costume, of which 'Woman with a Pearl' is the most famous.
Corot died in Paris in 1875, widely loved and widely forged. His silvery, breathable outdoor light and his practice of the oil study in front of the motif passed directly to the Impressionists, who treated him as a precursor even when their color was louder than his.
The words the record keeps using: silvery, lyric, calm, aerial, modest, luminous.
At a glance
- Lived 1796–1875
- Origin French
- Worked in Rome, Paris
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Barbizon School
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Atmospheric perspective, En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- The Bridge at Narni, 1826 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (oil study; a more finished version is in the Louvre))
The ruined Augustan bridge at Narni spans a gorge in the Umbrian hills, painted as an outdoor oil study during Corot's first Italian stay. Galassi treats this campaign — including the Narni views — as the moment when… - The Pond at Ville-d'Avray, 1867 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Trees screen a still pond at Ville-d'Avray, the suburb west of Paris where Corot's family kept a house and where he returned for decades. The late landscapes of this motif — silver foliage, a pale sky, a few small… - Woman with a Pearl, 1868 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
A young woman in Italianate studio dress turns toward us, a pearl at the center of her forehead, in a half-length that quietly answers the Mona Lisa. It is the best-known of Corot's late figure pictures, painted from a…
What was said
Galassi argues that Corot's Italian oil studies — including the Narni bridge views — remade classical landscape by painting the Campagna in front of the motif, in a single sitting, so that observed daylight rather than studio formula carried the site.
On Galassi's reading, Corot's aim in Italy and after was to keep the constructive order of classical landscape while submitting it to real outdoor tone — a loyalty to seen light that continues in the silvery French ponds and even in the quiet studio figures.
Younger landscapists of the Impressionist generation treated Corot as a precursor of outdoor painting, citing the silvery envelope of his trees and ponds even as they raised the key of color beyond his greys.
Lineage
Passed on to Claude Monet
What would Jean-Baptiste-Camille make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Jean-Baptiste-Camille · Keep a life moment the way Jean-Baptiste-Camille would · Pictures made after Jean-Baptiste-Camille