Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796-1875)

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"He is still the strongest; he anticipated everything..." Edgar Degas, 1883. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is one of the giants of 19th century art history, who almost single-handedly established landscape painting as an accepted genre in its own right. Although he paid hommage to the past, his career began as artists started to look beyond the conventions of Academic tradition; it ended almost 60 years later, at a time when the Impressionists were building on the trail that he had first pioneered, by further pushing the boundaries of light, colour, atmosphere and subject matter. Corot is associated in the popular imagination with the dreamy landscapes defined by suffused light and soft brushstrokes, known as "Souvenirs", which drew inspiration from Corot's three trips to Italy (lots 212 and 215) and for his fresh, light-filled but more prosaic images of the country around his native village of Ville d'Avray, often painted on a smaller scale (lots 217 and 218). However, as the following lots attest, Corot worked in a wide range of keys, which reflected both a natural evolution of his style, and a conscious adaptation to the demands of his subject (real, imagined, landscape, portrait or history painting). The defining experiences of Corot's artistic development were his trips to Italy. The first of these, in 1825-1828, was characterized by his efforts to capture the essence of natural light in countless plein-air studies of the Campagna, and to master perspective through small scale but complex renditions of the buildings of Rome. Although to the modern eye, these works look finished, paintings such as Torrent sous les arbres (lot 210) were to Corot simple exercises. In this case, the painting is largely a study of rocks, a required stage of a landscape artist's apprenticeship in classical teaching. By the time of Corot's third and final trip to Italy in 1843, naturalistic effect was absorbed into a more complex style which synthesised a number of art historical antecedants (such as the Italianate paintings of Claude Lorrain), greater compositional daring, and a wider range of subject matter. This translated often into landscapes with a slightly historical flavour (lot 211), with classical references, a greater sense of mass and stronger, earthier colours. These works were executed mostly on canvas, rather than on paper, reflecting their execution in a studio rather than en plein air. Corot's portraits are the equivalents of his landscapes of Ville d'Avray: rooted in the familiarity of family and friends, sober, and eschewing all grandeur or attempts at flattery. Usually presenting his sitters against a plain background in a manner reminiscent of the portraits of Ingres, Corot concentrates on the details of expression to give his paintings psychological intensity with great economy of means. The artist's self-portrait (lot 9), his earliest known work, is simply composed but captures Corot's quiet confidence and directness. His painting of Mme Delalain is similarly forthright: rendered in an almost monochromatic palette and devoid of extraneous detail to focus on the sitter's friendly, but thoughtful and slightly quizzical expression. In both landscape and portraiture, Corot's paintings have a timeless quality which is both pensive and poetic; they are elevated further by the artist's ability to modulate the mood of his paintings across a wide range of subject matter, which makes them so resonant today.

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796-1875)

Self Portrait

Details

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796-1875)
Self Portrait
oil on paper laid down on board
8 5/8 x 6½ in. (22 x 16.7 cm.)
Painted circa 1818-1821.

Provenance

Mme Laurent-Denis Senengon, neé Annette-Octavie Corot (1793-1874), the artist's sister.
Private collection, Luxembourg.

Literature

P. Dieterle, M. Dieterle, and C. Lebeau, Corot: cinquième supplément à L'oeuvre de Corot par A. Robaut et Moreau-Nélaton , Paris, 2002, pp. 4-5, no. 1 (illustrated).

Special notice

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