Corot’s family became the prosperous owners of a hat shop in Paris. He was the middle of three children and lived above the shop until he was sent to school near Rouen. Unable to stand boarding school, he moved to the house of a family friend and spent his weekends walking in the country with the father. These nature walks had great effect on him and were the basis for his first landscape paintings. Attempting to follow in the commercial footsteps of his parents, he was apprenticed to a draper and only at the age of 26 did he succeed in persuading his father to let him adopt the profession of a painter. His father did, however, support him from then on, bestowing on his son a lifelong yearly allowance of 1500 francs which financed a studio, materials and travel.
Corot’s early work developed in the tradition of 19th Century Neoclassicism and under the tuition of Achille-Etna Michallon, a landscape painter who had been a protégé of David, Corot studied nature through the lens of classical theory. Although this academic style was on the wain, Corot always declared his loyalty to Michallon’s influence: I made my first landscape from nature under the eye of this painting, whose advice was to render with the greatest scrupulousness everything I saw before me. The lesson worked: since then I have always treasured precision. On Michallon’s premature death, Corot studied with Jean-Victor Bertin, Michallon’s own teacher, who set him to work at copying lithographs of botanical subjects in order to learn precise organic forms. Corot’s sketchbooks came to be filled with precise depictions of tree trunks, rocks and plants and in his paintings, he came to combine this devotion to observation with the inspiration of neo-classical idealism.
With the support of his parents, Corot was able to spend 3 years in Italy, from 1825-1828, during which time he worked and travelled with other French painters, spending most of his time studying the light and the landscape rather than the paintings of the Renaissance masters. The notebooks he brought back to France, filled with sketches of architecture, views and figure groups and the intense work he had put into understanding and depicting the subtle variations of light cast on stone, earth and vegetation gave a foundation to the paintings produced in the following years, back in France. His work was not received enthusiastically at the Salon, his neoclassical interpretations of landscape were perceived as awkward and he returned to Italy pained at the lack of recognition. It was only towards the end of the 1840s that Corot began to be perceived as an important figure; Delacroix noted in his journal of 1847 “Corot is a true artist. One has to see a painter in his own place to get an idea of his worth… Corot delves deeply into a subject ….”. By 1848, he had been invited to become a member of the Salon jury, his works became increasingly in demand and young painters were eager to enter his studio.
Though he enjoyed the company of women, he never married, apparently not wanting to embroil himself in a domestic life which would distract from his work. It was only with the death of his parents, however, in 1847 and 1851, that Corot became truly independent in his way of life, and his style itself became freer and more impressionistic, despite the fact that he still mixed realism with Neoclassicism to the extent that one critic declared ‘If M. Corot would kill, once and for all, the nymphs of his woods and replace them with peasants, I should like him beyond measure.’
Corot’s habitual mode of work was to spend the summer months outside, sketching and studying nature, working in the countryside around Paris. The winter was then passed in his studio, translating the sketches he had made into finished pictures. After the death of his parents, his studio became a meeting point for students, dealers, collectors and friends. Corot was convivial and generous, and was held in great affection and admiration by his peers. The market for his paintings became increasingly strong and the high prices they fetched allowed him to give generously to young artists and to the poor of Paris. He bought a house in Auvers for Honoré Daumier, by then blind and homeless, and supported Millet’s impoverished widow and children. His influence on the course of landscape painting was extremely significant, his elevation of the oil sketch, made en plein air to the status of a work of art in its own right, was hugely important and his devotion to the study and depiction of nature and of the effects of light led to his being considered the precursor of Impressionism. The best known of his many pupils and followers were Pissarro, Boudin, Berthe Morisot and François-Louis Français.
Corot began to use charcoal for landscape studies in the last years of his life. The atmospheric effects its softness allowed for suited his love of shadows and his sense of the poetic in nature. A typical example of this so-called ‘second manner of Corot as a draughtsman’1, he has used a dark paper to heighten the glimmering light in this rather interesting view: a narrow track leads alongside the looming mass of a tall Cyprus tree and on to wind past an Italianate tower, an echo of earlier work. Other comparable drawings from this period are in the Louvre, such as the studies with classical themes entitled Orphée salutes the Light and The Sleep of Diana2.
1. See exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Hommage à Corot, 1975, p.162.
2. See exhibition op.cit., cats.164 and 165, p.160-161.
