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Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (July 26, 1796 - February 22,
1875) was a French landscape oil painting artist.
Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in
the mid- nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape
painting: His work simultaneously references the Neo-Classical
tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of
Impressionism. Of him
Claude Monet
exclaimed "There is only one master here--Corot. We are nothing
compared to him, nothing." His contributions to figure painting are
hardly less important;
Degas preferred his
figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of
Picasso pay overt
homage to Corot's influence.
Historians somewhat arbitrarily divided his work into periods, but
the point of division is never certain, as he often completed a
picture years after he began it. In his early period he painted
traditionally and "tight" ? with minute exactness, clear outlines,
and with absolute definition of objects throughout. After his 50th
year his methods changed to breadth of tone and an approach to
poetic power, and about 20 years later, from about 1865 onwards,
his manner of painting became full of mystery and poetry. In part,
this evolution in expression can be seen as marking the transition
from the plein-air paintings of his youth, shot through with warm
natural light, to the studio- created landscapes of his late
maturity, enveloped in uniform tones of silver. In his final 10
years he became the "Père (Father) Corot" of Parisian artistic
circles, where he was regarded with personal affection, and
acknowledged as one of the five or six greatest landscape oil
painting artist the world has seen, along with Hobbema, Claude
Lorrain,
Turner
and Constable.
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