Works by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
416 works · 806 ms
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot painted his early studies of Italy outdoors, full of warm sunlight. His later landscapes, made from memory in the studio, turn soft and silvery, with feathery trees.
Around the time he quit the drapery trade at 26, Corot studied briefly with Achille Etna Michallon, whose only advice was to paint exactly what he saw. In Italy from 1825 to 1828 he worked outdoors around Rome, and wrote that the sun there made his palette feel powerless. The Bridge at Narni, in oil on paper from 1826, sets the broken arch over a pale river in dusty greens and ochres. In 1827 his first Salon picture, View at Narni, turned a quick study of the ruin into a pastoral with big shade trees and lawns.
From the 1850s he painted souvenirs, imagined views of places seen years before, in light, loose dabs. In The Moored Boatman: Souvenir of an Italian Lake, feathery trees fill the right half, a man in a red cap sits in a long boat at the shore, and a town across the water is a blue-grey shape. His colours stayed close to browns and silvery greens, and in the 1860s he took up photography. He also tried cliché verre, a cross between photography and engraving: in the Self-Portrait of 1858 a face looks out of a net of scratched lines.
He painted figures from models in the studio, often in Italian costume, but almost never exhibited them. In Interrupted Reading, from about 1870, a woman with red beads in her hair rests her head on her hand, the book lowered to her knee.
Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Louvre, Art Institute of Chicago.
