Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796, the son of a cloth merchant and a Swiss milliner. He studied drawing in the evenings at the Academie Suisse. At the age of 26, an allowance from his father enabled him to become a pupil of Achille Michallon, and later of Victor Bertin, both landscape painters in the classical tradition. At this time, he made his first visits to the Forest of Fountainbleau. He completed his studies in Italy from 1825 to 1828 and sent Italian landscapes to the Paris Salon in 1827. He visited Italy on two more occasions, in 1834 and 1843, painting in Rome, Florence and Venice; he also visited the Swiss Lakes, Holland, England and traveled extensively throughout the Normandy, Burgundy and Brittany regions of France.

Truthfulness to nature, and the precise observation of tonal values ensured the admiration on which his fame rests. This passion for painting from nature closely allied him to the Barbizon school. He developed a particularly close friendship with Charles Francois Daubigny and was an inspiration to many other exponents of this group. Corot also painted mythological and religious subjects, nudes and nymphs in landscape settings, and portraits, which show the influence of Monet and Courbet, his younger contemporaries.

From spring to autumn, he lived with his parents at Ville d’Avray, painting mornings and evenings in the outdoors, capturing the light effects and atmosphere of his favorite times of day. In winter, he worked in the studio in Paris composing canvases from the many sketches produced during the summer.

Corot was an extremely kind and generous man much loved by his fellow artists, whom he was always ready to help with money and advice. He was awarded numerous medals and the Légion d’honneur in 1846. Acknowledged as the world’s foremost landscape painter, fame did not spoil the simplicity of his character. “An angel who smokes a pipe,” Degas once described him.

The later lyrical landscapes with figures and trees enveloped in diaphanous grey - green mists became extremely popular and were much reproduced.