Camille Corot: The Complete Story
Camille Corot was the French painter who quietly built the bridge between formal classical landscape and Impressionism. His silvery, misty scenes of trees and water look soft and dreamlike, but the small, bright oil studies he made outdoors in Italy taught a whole generation, Monet's included, how to catch real light on the spot.
Adored in his own time and copied ever since, he is also, by a strange twist, the most forged painter in history.
Born: Paris, 1796
Known for: silvery landscapes, plein air oil studies, the link to Impressionism
Died: Paris, 1875
The two Corots
There are really two of him. One painted the gauzy, poetic landscapes the public loved, feathery trees, soft light, a small figure, all in muted silver greens. These made his name and his fortune.
The other Corot, barely known in his day, made firm little studies outdoors, capturing a real hour and weather with startling freshness. See what is landscape painting.
The man who taught the open air
Those outdoor oil studies, many painted on trips to Italy in the 1820s, were a quiet turning point. Corot worked straight from nature, fast, decades before the Impressionists made it their banner. See what is en plein air.
Pissarro signed himself a pupil of Corot. Monet, Berthe Morisot and Degas all studied him. He is the calm hinge on which French landscape swings from the classical past into the modern.
Pere Corot, the generous one
Corot was famously warm, nicknamed Pere Corot, Father Corot, by younger artists. He gave money to the struggling, bought a house for the blind and broke Honore Daumier, and supported the widow of Jean-Francois Millet.
That kindness, plus his fame, fed a problem that outlived him. His loose, easy to copy manner was so simple to fake that a joke still runs through the trade: Corot painted three thousand pictures, ten thousand of which are in America.
The questions that come up about Corot
What is Camille Corot famous for?
Silvery poetic landscapes and the outdoor oil studies that fed Impressionism.
Did he influence the Impressionists?
Deeply. Pissarro and others called themselves his pupils.
Why are there so many fakes?
His soft, much copied style is notoriously easy to forge, so countless fakes carry his name.
The quiet hinge of modern landscape
Corot is easy to skip past because he is gentle. Pull him out, though, and modern landscape loses its bridge. Every Impressionist sunrise owes something to a man patiently painting Italian light in the 1820s.
One last detail. Late in life he turned to quiet studio figures of women reading or dreaming, like Woman with a Pearl. Ignored then, those portraits are now counted among his most modern and moving work.