Jean Baptiste
Camille Corot
Biography

Corot could see the Tuileries gardens and The Louvre from the windows of his home. We must presume that growing up in such a beautiful setting, where he lived for more than thirty years, had a substantial influence on Corot’s art.

Camille was enrolled in a small elementary school in the Rue Vaugirard in Paris where he stayed until 1806. At the age of eleven, his parents then sent him to the College de Rouen. A friend of the family, M. Sennegon, living in Rouen, was charged to look after the boy. The Sennegon family loved the out-of-doors, and shared their many nature walks through the woods and across the streams with Camille.

His bonding once again with nature only served to reinforce his desire to paint. The country settings at Ville-dAvray would provide Corot with an immense amount of his “en plein air” paintings until the very end, only turning into a studio painter very late in his life due to the constraints of old age. Moreau-Nelaton made a very keen observation when he said, “Providence created Ville-d’Avray for Corot, and Corot for Ville-d’Avray.”

In 1822, when Camille was twenty-six, his father, weary of hearing his son’s complaints about working for the fabric dealers, finally asked him what did he really want to accomplish in a future career. He said firmly, “I want to be a painter.” Due to the untimely death of his younger sister, Victoire-Anne, her family’s allowance could now be made available to finance his lifestyle. This modest funding supported Camille comfortably for the remainder of his life. Later in his career, when he finally began to receive highly paid commissions, he continued to live on this allowance, sharing most of his professional earnings with less fortunate artists and friends.

At the time Corot embraced it, he was one of the few wielding a new path in the world of art.

The early forays into landscape art created new ideas and techniques regarding the ever essential form. Rendering nature as the ruling subject was in great opposition to the old classicist’s view that only the gods or the divined man of god could reign as king of the canvas. Nature, to them, was merely a surrounding backdrop for the human subject.

But to the landscape painter, especially to Corot, man lost this isolated importance within the context of his new cosmos, becoming merely one of the many organic parts of nature. It has been said that in a few of his works, he had other artists paint in the figures after he had completed his work, so disinterested was he in this part of his landscape creations.

This would build the strong foundation to support all of his future “impressionist” painted imagery.

For three years, he traveled between Rome and Naples, perfecting his rendering of the subtlest values. He did visit the museums, although he never did set foot into the Sistine Chapel. He preferred the study of the “plein air” and his own visions to that of the great Italian masters. Tone was Corot’s great medium. “What there is to see in painting,” he said once, “or rather, what I look for, is the form, the whole, the equilibrium of tones. Color comes after this with me.” Like Rembrandt, he made color with light and shade.

Corot became, thereafter, an avid traveler of the rural countryside, always surprising his friends by showing up in a different summertime locality as frequent as every two weeks. He would transition between en plein air, painting during the summer months, making small oil sketches of nature, and then utilizing his studio during the winter time for larger paintings that he would present at the Salon.

In his later years, Corot began to soften his style. He paid ever more attention to the value of shading. His technique was more flexible, resulting with experiments in rendering light both in his paintings and his drawings. In 1853, he began making a series of visits to the English Channel, in which his use of charcoal emerged.

With his friend Constant Dutilleux, a lithographer, Corot began experimenting with a new process called cliché-verre. It was a new technique that combined photography and lithography. Corot produced sixty-six plates, however, he left the printing to others. Inspired by the Roman countryside, Corot’s most notable clichés-verre were The Gardens of Horace, Souvenir of Ostia, and The Banks of the Po River, completed between 1855 and 1858.

Cliche-verre was a new reproductive engraving technique discovered by his friend, Dutilleux, around 1853. This process combined photography and lithography. A plate of glass was first coated with printer’s ink with a lithographic roller, and then sprinkled with talc to quicken the drying time. The artist then drew on it with an engraver’s needle. A piece of sensitive paper was applied to the plate and then exposed to sunlight. This technique, unfortunately, only produced two or three proofs. Corot, always the fastidious craftsman, executed remarkable results. However, they never had the pristine beauty of the etchings and lithographs that he rendered toward the end of his life. There are but a handful of his etchings, but no one surpassed his mastery of this art, as a result of his endless quest for harmonious tonal values.