UNKNOWNCOROT JILL NEWHOUSE Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Unpublished Drawings
catalogue by Amy Kurlander
expertise by Martin Dieterle Claire Lebeau Jill Newhouse
Jill Newhouse Gallery 4 East 81st Street New York, NY 10028 Tel (212) 249-9216 email: [email protected] www.jillnewhouse.com This catalogue accompanies an exhibition on view from June 5 to July 13, 2012 Jill Newhouse Gallery 4 East 81st Street New York, NY 10028 Tel (212) 249-9216 email: [email protected] www.jillnewhouse.com acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone who has worked on this project.
Martin Dieterle, my dear friend and mentor in the study of the work of Corot, has given me, and all of us in the art world, the great gift of his keen eye and generous spirit. A painter himself, he brings an instinctive accuracy to judgments of authenticity. His philosophical approach avoids preconception and is always open-minded. We have all learned greatly from him. Claire Lebeau has added her precision and her eye for nuance and detail, as well as her great patience in navigating the waters of authentication. Amy Kurlander wrote her doctoral dissertation on Corot and has added her scholarship to her deep understanding of Corot’s work. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Margret Stuffmann and Dr. Dorit Schäfer whose major exhibition on the paintings and drawings of Corot opens in Karlsruhe in October 2012. Their ideas were inspirational in the organization of this show. Christa Savino keeps the gallery running, and to her I am endlessly grateful. Megan Wiessner, also in the gallery, complied Corot’s chronology and handled the details of the loans. Bob Lorenzson has been the gallery’s photographer and Larry Sunden has again organized the design and production of the catalogue. Paper conservation and condition reports were provided by Marjorie Shelley in particular, along with Alan Firkser and Alvarez Fine Art Services. Many of our colleagues have also been of great help and I would personally like to thank Patrick, Louis, Matthieu and Augustin de Bayser and Galerie de Bayser; Antoine Lorenceau, Galerie Brame et Lorenceau; Anisabelle and Florence Berès, Galerie Berès; Arturo and Corinne Cuéllar; Roy Davis and Cecily Langdale; Hubert Duchemin, and Robert Kashey, Shepherd Gallery. Lastly, numerous clients and friends of the gallery who have been kind enough to lend their drawings have asked to remain anonymous; my deepest gratitude to you all, without whom this exhibition would not have been possible. — J.N.
Chronology Compiled by Megan Wiessner (For an extensive chronology, see Paris, Ottawa and New York 1996, pp. 409 ff.)
1796 Born July 17 in Paris.
1815–22 After completing secondary studies in Rouen and Poissy, apprentices with cloth merchants in Paris. Becomes more interested in art, however, and begins taking drawing lessons.
1817 His parents purchase a country house in Ville d’Avray. His future teacher Achille-Etna Michallon (1796–1822) wins the Grand Prix de Rome for historical landscape.
1822 His parents accept his decision to become an artist, and agree to provide a yearly income. Enters Michallon’s studio and spends the summer working outdoors at Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud, and in Normandy before Michallon’s death in the fall. Joins the studio of landscape painter Jean-Victor Bertin (1767–1842) and works in Fontainebleau and Moret.
1823–24 Paints his first historical landscape,Orphée charme les humains.
1825 Begins his first voyage to Italy. Arrives in Rome in December, rents a room near the Piazza di Spagna, paints several views of the city and the Coliseum, and befriends other artists.
1826 Works along the Tiber and in the Farnese Gardens. Passes the greater part of the summer in the region of Civita Castellana; stays at Papigno in August and September. Returns to Rome in October. Journeys south of Rome to Lake Albano and Lake Nemi in November, and works in Tivoli in December.
1827 In Rome from January to April. Sends two paintings, Vue prise à Narni (National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa) and Campagne de Rome (Kunsthaus, Zurich) to the Salon. Journeys include Lake Albano, Civitella, the Subiaco region, and Civitella Castellana. Returns to Rome in November, and works on large paintings intended for the Salon during the winter of 1827–28.
1828 After a visit to Naples in the spring, and brief stays in Venice and Switzerland, returns to Paris in October.
1829 Visits Normandy and, for the first time, Brittany. Begins painting portraits of friends. Exhibits two Italian views at the Galerie Lebrun in Paris. 1830 Leaves Paris to escape the Revolution of 1830 and visits Chartres, Normandy, and the north of France. Frequents the forest of Fontainebleau, which he will continue to visit for the next two decades.
1833 Wins a second-class medal at the Salon for Vue de la forêt de Fontainebleau (also called Le Gué, R II, no. 257). Visits Normandy twice and paints more portraits of family members.
1834 Begins his second voyage to Italy in May. Visits sites in northern Italy, including San Remo, Genoa, La Spezia, Pisa, Volterra, Florence, Venice, the lake country, and Milan. Returns to Paris in late autumn.
1835 Exhibits Agar dans le désert (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Vue prise à Riva, Tyrol italien (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich) at the Salon.
1839 Un soir: paysage (J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu) one of Corot’s two Salon paintings, inspires verses by Théophile Gautier.
1840 Exhibits four paintings at the Salon, including Un moine (Musée du Louvre, Paris) and Le Petit Berger (La Cour d’Or, Musées de Metz), which is bought by the State.
1843 The Salon jury accepts two works but rejects L’Incendie de Sodome, resulting in a protest of fellow artists on his behalf. Makes his third and final voyage to Italy between May and September, spending most of his time in or near Rome.
1844 Befriends Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867). Resubmits l’Incendie de Sodome, which is accepted by the Salon jury unchanged but with a new title, Le Destruction de Sodome (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
1845 Visits family and friends, and resides often at Ville d’Avray. Enjoys a growing reputation and the admiration of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Théophile Thoré (1807–1869) at the Salon. In September, the City of Paris awards him a commission to paint an altarpiece for the church of Saint- Nicolas-du-Chardonnay (Le Baptême du Christ, R. 466).
1846 Continues to travel, spending time in Fontainebleau, Versailles, and Ville d’Avray. Named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in July.
1847 Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) visits his studio. Befriends the Arras-based painter and collector Constant Dutilleux (1807–1865), and passes most of the year at Ville d’Avray in order to care for his dying father. 1848–50 After the Salon jury is reformed, is repeatedly elected by his colleagues and begins to exhibit more paintings each year. The State purchases a number of these works, including Le Bain du Berger (Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai) and Le Christ au Jardin des Oliviers (Musée de Langres).
1851 Death of his mother. Begins to intensify his traveling and to regularly visit Dutilleux in Arras.
1852 At the home of Dutilleux, meets Alfred Robaut (1819–1909), Dutilleux’s future son-in-law and the future author of his catalogue raisonné. Befriends the painter Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878).
1853 Begins to experiment with cliché-verre with the Arras photographers Louis Grandguillaume and Adalbert Cuvelier (1812–1871), the inventors of the technique. Designs more than 60 plates over the course of the next twenty years.
1854 Travels to Belgium and the Netherlands with Dutilleux.
1855 Exhibits six paintings at the Exposition Universelle and receives a first class medal. Emperor Napoleon III purchases Souvenir de Marcoussis (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
1857 Exhibits an extensively reworked version of his Salon painting of 1844, Le Destruction de Sodome, under its orginal title, l’Incendie de Sodome, at the Salon.
1858 Places fifty-eight paintings at auction through the appraiser Thirault. Travels include trips to Normandy and Troyes.
1859 Sends a number of ambitious compositions showing figures in the landscape to the Salon. His work is increasingly sought by collectors and dealers and admired by a new generation of open-air painters, many of whom he mentors.
1862 Travels to London for the World’s Fair. Meets Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). Berthe Morisot becomes a student.
1864 Serves as a member of the jury at the Salon. Napoléon III purchases Souvenir de Mortefontaine (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
1865 Stays in Auvers-sur-Oise, Mantes, Fontainebleau, and Normandy. Death of Dutilleux.
1866 Napoleon III purchases Solitude (Private Collection) for his private collection. Paintings by Corot are exhibited in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. 1867 Exhibits seven important paintings at the Exposition Universelle, receives a medal there and is named an Officer of the Legion of Honor.
1869 Exhibitions in London and Munich. Cancels most travel plans due to poor health.
1870 Working in his studio during the siege of Paris in the Franco Prussian war, he paints Paris incendié par les allemands (location unknown).
1872–74 Travels and paints continuously, exhibiting both at the Salon and abroad.
1875 Dies of stomach cancer at age 79 on February 22. A posthumous sale of his studio and his collection is held in May and June of that year, as is a large retrospective at the École des Beaux-Arts. Corot as Draftsman Amy Kurlander
Over one hundred thirty years after the artist’s death, it is not easy to characterize Corot’s particular achievements in drawing. Exhibitions of Corot’s drawings have been infrequent, especially outside France, and to our knowledge ours is the first to be held in the United States. But the most interesting challenge to seeing Corot’s drawing as an oeuvre is that his objectives and strategies with pencil, pen, chalk and charcoal changed considerably over time. The artist who, in the 1820s, applied his classical training to define and place the mountains surrounding Civitella (no. 4) began in the 1850s to use his powers of formal synthesis and imagination to create idyllic souvenirs such as Moonlit Landscape (no. 23) and Willow Grove (no. 29). His understanding of landscape—and the role of drawing in landscape—had become quite different. When Corot first devoted himself to landscape in the early1820 s, he was aligning himself with an academic tradition which required that he work within a specific genre. The goal of a landscape painter was to produce a large composition, usually with figures, for the annual Salon in Paris. The most highly prized landscape painting was the paysage historique, with its references to Greco-Roman or Biblical narratives. The training undertaken by an aspiring landscape painter such as Corot included direct study of outdoor motifs, both in graphite and oil. Open-air study and sketching was a key part of the process of learning to see and paint, and would serve the artist in the studio as he conceived and executed these formal works to be submitted to the Salon jury. Certainly, the drawings from Corot’s first Rome trip in 1825–28 (nos. 3–6) belong in this context of classical landscape training, which was further enriched by the artist’s interactions with the international colonies of young landscape painters in Rome. From Achille-Etna Michallon (1796–1822) and Jean-Victor Bertin (1767–1842) during his earliest years of study 1822–25, Corot learned to use hard graphite pencil to capture motifs with precise contours, as well as diagonal hatching to indicate shading. Corot frequently reinforced the graphite drawings of this era in ink and sometimes recopied his initial drawings entirely, often using tracing paper as the support (no. 5). A graphite drawing was often the first point of contact between Corot and the motif, although drawing was also part of a protracted process of observation, notation and revision, involving different media at different points in time. Some of the Rome drawings are preliminary studies for oil sketches, and may well have undergone further revision either when revisiting the motif—which Corot frequently did—or when returning to the studio. By the 1850s, ideas about ambitious art and the importance of landscape painting were hotly disputed. Changing audiences, venues, techniques, markets and, just as important, new ways of seeing and enjoying nature would continue to transform French landscape painting through Impressionism. Among the changes was the increasing primacy of outdoor study for artists like Corot, Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), and Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878). Painting and drawing landscape outdoors was no longer a step along the way to the finished work, but gained enormous practical and symbolic importance as the very motivation for landscape representation. This was a form of art that demanded a “direct” encounter between artist and nature, beholder and landscape. Established techniques of classical landscape seemed increasingly stiff, tired, and “artificial;” but what methods of composing and modes of execution could capture nature more vividly, while having the weight and ambition of a complete, independent work of art? This generation of landscape painters offered various solutions at different times. One development that is easy for modern viewers to recognize, from a vantage point after Impressionism, was a looser handling of the brush and the instruments of drawing. Corot pushed this gestural, improvisational mode of execution further than his contemporaries, especially in drawing. The long, supple lines that indicate the direction of branches and tree trunks (nos. 18, 25, 26, 28); the briskly applied straighter lines that reinforce contours (nos. 19, 21); masses sometimes defined by smoothed, stumped passages of charcoal, sometimes through scribbling and scratching (nos. 23, 26) were not just techniques of execution. For Corot’s admirers, this repertory of mark-making comprised a coherent “way of seeing” and of seizing nature through the artist’s eye and hand. Sketchbook folio, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 8708 47, folios 24v and 25r. In addition, Corot placed immense importance throughout his career on the establishment of “unity” in landscape. During the first trip to Rome, his progress in painting and drawing had much to do with an increasing ability to create an integrated image through the representation of light and shadow. Capturing relative values of light and dark served not only to distinguish one form from another, or to articulate dimension, but also to unify the image through the patterns and gradations of value across the field (no.6 ). Corot never forgot this lesson. As the decades progressed, as Corot simplified his compositions by concentrating their elements into a compressed space with a few large masses, he also relied on what he called a “science of values” as a guiding principle. As the artist noted in a sketchbook of around 1860: Le dessin est la première chose à chercher—ensuite les valeurs—les rapports des formes et des valeurs—voilà les points d’appui—après la couleur, enfin l’exécution. (“Drawing is the first thing to pursue—then values—the relations between forms and values—these are the main points—afterwards color, execution last.”) Musée du Louvre, RF 8709, fol. 42 verso, cited in Sérullaz 2007, p. 7. Before setting down these objectives in words, however, Corot had developed a remarkable symbolic language for recording the relative lights and darks of a given motif (see illustration on previous page; Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 8708 47, folios 24v and 25r). In a number of sketches from the notebooks of the 1850s and 1860s, he would place a circle to mean light, a square to mean dark, and the relative size of circles and squares, if there were more than one, to indicate the relative depth of light and dark. A page from folio I in our sketchbook from the early 1860s shows Corot deploying this language in a casual notation. Sketches like these tell us that in the later years, Corot’s landscape was not just a gestural performance by the artist, but a particular mode of perception, one that began with the cognition and jotting down of a set of relationships already in nature—the principal lines (“le dessin”) and the relative values of a cohering motif. Although it is not until the later years that Corot produced many drawings as independent, signed compositions, either for sale or to offer as gifts, Corot’s figure studies often have a “complete” presence from an early date, as in his study of a Roman peasant boy from around 1825 (no. 3). In the 1830s, Corot’s Salon paintings sometimes show him struggling with the task of integrating the fig- ure in the landscape in a convincing way—his critics often faulted him on this point—while other, more intimate kinds of figural representation, including por- trait drawings and paintings of family and close friends, are among Corot’s most compelling works of this era (nos. 8, 11, 13). One issue for Corot was that he resisted treating the human body with the same kind of simplification and loose execution with which he handled landscape. One work on view, a study for the figures inLa Toilette of the 1859 Salon (no. 21), is a rare example of a drawing study for a specific Salon painting of this period. The task of placing large figures in the landscape seems to have required more pointed, preliminary drawing work than usual. A reward of any monographic drawings exhibition is that it enlarges our view of the artist’s interests and occupations. There is much to be discovered in Corot’s drawings from the 1830s and 1840s, a period in which the artist’s efforts to develop a “public” style of landscape painting for the Salon and for official commissions were not always entirely successful. Other kinds of challenges take shape in outdoor painting and drawing during these years, particularly in the course of Corot’s study in the forest of Fontainebleau and his travels throughout France. There are fine, varied examples of Corot’s outdoor work in Normandy (nos. 7, 12, 17) and two very different kinds of studies made in the forest (nos. 9, 15). For this viewer, the drawing of Paris from an elevated vantage point (no. 10)—an attempt to revisit the lessons learned on the hills of Rome and take them in a different direction—was a most unexpected discovery, as was the fascinating architectural study of St.-Germain-en-Laye (no. 16). The organizers of the exhibition join me in inviting viewers to make their own discoveries about Corot the artist and Corot the draftsman. Just as we know and value more than one “Corot,” we will continue to discover the unknown Corot through continued curiosity about the many objectives, themes, and media that comprise this rich oeuvre.
CATALOGUE 1. Valley of Montmorency, seen from Saint-Prix, c. 1820–24
Graphite on paper 7½ x 10¼ inches (19 x 26 cm) Inscribed verso: Saint-Prix, vallée de Montmorency
Private Collection
This drawing has recently been attributed to Corot on the basis of its technique and the inscription on the verso. Many aspects of this charming sheet point to a very early date. The naïve perspective of the buildings in the landscape, the intensely rectilinear composition, and almost literal attention to details of execution probably place the work no later than 1822, when Corot received his first formal training in the studio of Michallon. Located 15 kilometers north of Paris, the village of Saint-Prix dominates the valley of Montmorency in the region of the Oise.
2. Tree Study, 1823
Graphite on paper 7 8¾ × 5 ⁄8 inches (22.2 × 14.9 cm) Signed, inscribed and dated: Corot Près St. Germain 1823 provenance Sotheby’s New York, April 23, 2004, lot 10; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2004).
Private Collection
This study of two trees, one in full leaf and the other mostly bare, is an example of Corot’s engagement with open-air subjects before his first trip to Italy. The drawing effectively captures two aspects of a tree’s form: its masses, articulated through the shading of the clumps of foliage, and the linear structure of its trunk and branches. It also documents Corot’s response to the lessons in landscape painting and drawing that he was learning during this era, first in the atelier of Michallon and, when this drawing was made, in the studio of Bertin.
This training included both direct study from nature on site and the copying of paintings, drawings, and prints, particularly prints of trees. Bertin had his students copy engravings of trees from Alphonse-Nicolas Michel Mandevare’s Principes raisonnés du paysage of 1804, as well as from his own lithographs of trees, published for instruction between 1816 and 1824. The schematic shapes of the leaves and regular hatching of the shaded foliage in Corot’s drawing are partly informed by these models, as are the treatment of the leaves as shaded masses and the trunk and branches as a kind of skeleton. But while Mandevare’s and Bertin’s detailed, dry renderings of trees are meant to clearly distinguish particular species, Corot’s drawings are more intent on capturing the trees as a complete motif, briskly apprehended and in the same spirit as his open-air oil sketches.
In his immensely influentialElemens de perspective pratique à l’usage des artistes, suivis de reflexions et conseils à un élève sur la peinture et particulièrement sur le genre du paysage of 1800, Pierre Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819), A.-N. Michel Mandevare, Principes raisonnés du Michallon’s teacher, advised the student of paysage, 1804, Musée du Louvre, Paris landscape painting to paint “des maquettes
faites à la hate, pour saisir la Nature sur le fait” (“quick rough sketches, to seize Nature in action.” p. 404). This work, however, makes the most of the tools of drawing. Corot has used hard and soft pencil, different thickness of line and a wide variety of gestural marks to add graphic variety to an already lively sketch. Jean-Victor Bertin, Plane Tree, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 3. Study of a Young Italian Boy, c. 1825–6
Graphite on paper 9½ × 10½ inches (24.1 × 26.7 cm) provenance Paris Art Market; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2003).
Private Collection
This sensitively drawn study of an adolescent dates from Corot’s first trip to Italy 1825–28( ). The figure’s hat, short jacket and breeches are identical to those worn by the sitter in Corot’s well-known figure painting,Jeune italien assis dans la Chambre de Corot à Rome (R II, no. 57, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims). The painting and drawing probably represent the same young man and both works were evidently done from life. Robaut dates the painting to the winter of 1825–26, shortly after Corot’s arrival in Rome, a period in which he executed a number of figure studies that place the sitter on a trunk in the artist’s studio: “. . . He rented a little room near the Spanish Steps. Unfortunately, at the beginning, the rain often keeps him shut up indoors; he is reduced to painting whatever is outside his window, or seats upon his trunk an Italian whom he met on the street, and has him pose for him while waiting for the bad weather to end” (Robaut I, p. 30).
Corot made many figure studies during his first Italian sojourn, but was particularly attached to the aforementioned painting. He made several versions of it, including one now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (Italian Peasant Boy, 1825–27, 1963.10.8) and another recorded by Robaut as Jeune italien assis (R II, no. 58, c. 1855, location unknown), which transposes the figure in a landscape, recasting him as a recumbent shepherd. In the original painting, the figure is clearly placed in the painter’s studio. The corner of a stretched canvas is evident in the upper right, and one of Corot’s oil sketches is depicted on the wall.
This drawing and related paintings belong to a genre, the peasant costume study, which was perfected by artists such as Michallon, Corot’s first teacher. But whereas Michallon’s studies emphasize the elaborate patterns and textures of the costumes, Corot was often equally or more interested in the figures’ pose, facial expression and physiognomy. Such studies would also assist Corot in his peopling of landscape compositions. As finely observed studies of individuals, these paintings and drawings point the way to Corot’s outstanding portrait paintings and Jeune italien assis dans la Chambre de Corot drawings of the 1830s, including Little Girl Asleep à Rome, 1825–26, Musée des Beaux- and Seated Camaldolese Monk (nos. 11, 13). Arts, Reims
4. Civitella, 1827
Pen and ink on paper 7 9¾ × 14 ⁄8 inches (24.8 × 37.8 cm) Inscribed lower right: Civitella Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a provenance Corot sale 1875; Collection Richard Goetz; Paris Art Market; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2010). exhibitions Paris, Galerie Hector Brame, June 14–July 5, 1957, no. 28; Berne, Kunstmuseum, Corot, January 23–March 13, 1960, no. 100. literature R IV, no. 2586.
Private collection
This drawing dates from Corot’s first sojourn in Rome, a critical period in the painter’s technical and aesthetic development as a landscape painter. It was during this trip that Corot undertook a systematic study of outdoor landscape drawing and oil sketching that was rooted in the techniques and teachings of the French school of classical landscape. Lengthy excursions to famous sites in the Roman countryside were a key part of this training, and the journeys would follow paths that travelers and artists had been making for centuries. One of these well-known sites was the spectacularly rugged landscape surrounding the hill town of Civitella, which was part of a circuit of travel into the mountains east of Rome. Corot embarked on this journey in the spring of 1827, arriving at the ancient town of Olevano in April and the environs of Civitella in July.
Corot’s other known drawings of this site rely more on incidents of trees and foliage to fix the landscape’s topography and indicate depth, light and shade (Vue de Civitella, c. 1827, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 8983). There are fewer such incidents in the present drawing, whose precisely Vue de Civitella, c. 1827, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF drawn contours and subtle indications 8983 of light and shadow create a lucid, complete view using deceptively simple means.
5. Landscape, Civita Castellana, 1826 or 1827
Pen and brown ink over graphite on calque mounted to wove paper 1 19 × 13 ⁄8 inches (48.3 × 33.3 cm) Inscribed upper right: Civita Castellana
provenance Galerie de Bayser, Paris.
Among Corot’s excursions during his first trip to Rome were two visits to Civita Castellana—a rocky, partly wooded valley twenty-seven miles north of the capital. These extended campaigns resulted in many drawings and oil sketches which, as a group, help demonstrate the rapidity of Corot’s progress in Rome. During his first trip to Civita Castellana, from mid-May to mid-July of 1826, Corot began to achieve a unified landscape image by simplifying his compositions and integrating his brushwork and penmarks into a consistent whole. By his second visit, in September and October of 1827, Corot had mastered a drawing technique that allowed him to articulate forms and spatial relations not only through line, but through variations in tone as well (Galassi 1991, pp. 176–178).
This drawing could belong to either the 1826 or 1827 campaign. A number of drawings in the Louvre that Corot dated 1827, also executed in pen and brown ink over graphite, represent a sous-bois motif at Civita Castellana not unlike that of this sheet (RF 8963, 4026, 3405). This drawing’s composition and degree of finish are especially comparable to one that Galassi tentatively dates 1827 (no. 250, p. 196). A particularly accomplished sous- bois oil study from one of these campaigns is Rocks by a Stream, Civita Castellana, Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill (RII, no. 176; Galassi, no. 246, p. 194). These drawing and oil studies appear to orbit around a painting titled The Fisher of Crayfish that was probably completed in the studio, and which Galassi dates 1826–27 (no. 247, p. 195). Fisher of Crayfish, 1826–27, Private Collection continued
It was typical for Corot to use calque as a drawing support during this period. Robaut documents other drawings on calque from the first Roman sojourn including a panoramic view of Castello Sant’Angelo (R IV, no. 2479) and a view of Olevano (R IV, no. 2568). Rocks by a Stream, Civita Castellana, 1826–27, Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill 6. Trees Among Rocks, with Italian Figures, c. 1827
Graphite on paper 11¼ x 4½ inches (28.5 x 37 cm) Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a provenance Corot sale 1875, purchased by Henri Rouart; Thence by descent; Maurice Gobin (by 1938); Sale, Piasa, Paris, March 31, 2000. exhibitions Paris, Galerie Maurice Gobin, Corot, 1938, no. 9; Paris, Musée du Louvre, Hommage à Corot, 1975, no. 128 (illus.). literature R IV, 2526, p. 17 (illus.); Maurice Gobin, L’art expressif au XIXe siècle français, Paris, 1960 (illus.); Musée du Louvre, Hommage à Corot , 1975, p. 140 (illus.).
Private Collection
Studies done in Rome testify to the great variety of topographical motifs and pictorial problems that Corot addressed as part of his training in classical landscape. Here, thick masses of trees emerge from large rock formations viewed up close, a challenge Corot tackled in other drawings of the Roman countryside from around the same date (Forest Landscape, c. 1826–27, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 2419r). In both works, the artist has taken care to emphasize key lines of tree trunks and branches in order to structure the entangled elements of the motif. Yet the drawings are essentially studies of light and shade. In this sheet especially, rhythms of light and dark, deployed skillfully across the sheet, animate and unify the image. Corot was moved to further “complete” the drawing with tiny figures at the bottom left.
Forest Landscape, c. 1826–27, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna
7. Port of Honfleur, c. 1830
Graphite on paper 9½ x 12½ inches (24.1 x 31 cm)
This drawing is one of several studies that Corot made in the Normandy coastal ports from around 1823 to 1830. The trips were partly facilitated by Corot’s family connection to the Sennegons, who lived outside Rouen (see nos. 8, 10 and 11), but the artist was also drawn to the villages of Honfleur, Trouville and Le Havre. The combination of expansive sky and sea, animated ports with boats, bustling figures, and jagged-cliffed beaches inspired many open- air painters from the era and would continue to draw artists throughout the century.
This particular work represents the shipyard at Honfleur, also the subject of an oil study by Corot. The boats, work materials, staging area and surrounding landscape have a similar arrangement in both drawing and painting (Chantier Naval à Honfleur, c. 1823, Pierre Dieterle, Martin Dieterle, and Claire Lebeau, Corot, Cinquiéme Supplément à L'Oeuvre de Corot par A. Robaut et Moreau-Nélaton, no. 6, Private Collection). The painting is believed to date from around 1823, as is another oil study of the same site, Old Wharf at Honfleur, now in the Rhode Island School of Design (c. 1822–25, R II, no. 35). While these paintings belong to the period before Corot’s first trip to Rome, the drawing’s technical prowess, particularly in the handling of the boats’ complex network of masts and rigging, suggests a date of around 1830.
above: Chantier Naval à Honfleur, c. 1823, Private Collection left: Quai d’un port de pêche, c. 1830, Musée du Louvre, Paris
8. Ville d’Avray: Corot and His Family, c. 1830–35
Graphite on laid paper 8¼ x 7¼ inches (20.4 x 18.4 cm) Signed and inscribed lower right: Ville d’Avray provenance Martin Reymert; Jill Newhouse Gallery (1989).
Private Collection
This intriguing drawing is certainly a depiction of Corot sketching in the company of his immediate family: from the left, his sister, Annette-Octavie Sennegon (1793–1874), his mother, born Marie-Françoise Oberson (1769–1851), and his father, Louis-Jacques Corot (1771–1847). Corot, depicted behind and considerably smaller than his sister and parents, appears to be at work sketching the view before him.
The four Corots are seated at the edge of their property, which Corot’s father had purchased in 1817. This was next to the chemin de Corot, the road in Ville d’Avray that separated the family’s garden and house from the two ponds that the artist would paint constantly in his later years. Before the artist’s name came to be equated with the ponds of Ville d’Avray, Corot had frequently drawn and painted this very road from different angles, points of view, and in different manners. In many of these paintings, the point of view is in fact just around the spot where the seated figure of Corot looks and sketches in the present drawing. One such painting (Ville d’Avray, c. 1820s, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 2640), shows the white buildings known as the Maisons Cabassud occupying most of the background, while the Corot property is hidden by foliage. A later painting (Le Chemin de Corot, R II, no. 516, c. 1849, Private Collection) shows the same view when the road was graded, with the edge of the Corot house just peeking out from the trees.
To our knowledge, only one other work by Corot is known in which all four members of the immediate family appear together. This is in the decorative panels that Corot painted in 1847, the year of his father’s death, for the kiosk in the garden at Ville d’Avray (R II, no. 600). Corot drew, but did not paint, portraits of his father. His painted portrait of his mother (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, NG 1852) has been dated 1833–35 on the basis of Ville d’Avray, c. 1820s, Musée du Louvre, Paris the sitter’s costume; Madame Corot
Madame Corot, c. 1833–35, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh owned a millinery shop on the Rue du Bac and would have sat for her portrait in the latest Parisian style. The present sheet probably dates from around the same time as the portrait of Madame Corot.
Corot was devoted to his family, with whom he had a complex relationship. A lifelong bachelor who received a yearly allowance from his parents until their death, Corot was already 55 when his mother died, at which point he and his sister inherited the property at Ville d’Avray. It seems his parents exercised a good deal of influence over his comings and goings. Interestingly, there is no evidence that either his mother or father were particularly interested in their son’s paintings or were aware of his growing stature as an artist. Robaut reports that when Corot was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1846, his father initially thought the cross was meant for himself. When assured that the honor had in fact been bestowed upon his fifty- year-old son, he wondered if it might be fitting to increase his allowance. Le Chemin de Corot, c. 1849, Private Collection 9. Trees in the Forest of Fontainebleau, c. 1830–35
Graphite on laid paper 1 7 11 ⁄8 x 8 ⁄8 inches (28.5 x 22.6 cm) Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a Inscribed by Robaut on verso upper left: Croquis de COROT/en forêt de Fontainebleau/(provient de la vente posthume du maître)/Offert à Monsieur Allard/Alf. Robaut provenance Corot sale 1875, part of lot 550 or 552; Alfred Robaut, Paris; M. Allard, Paris; Feichenfelt, Zurich; Jill Newhouse Gallery (1988). exhibitions New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Romanticism and the School of Nature, 2000, p. 50, no. 24. literature R IV, p. 253.
Private Collection
By the early 1800s, open-air painting and drawing directly from the motif had become a part of classical landscape practice. As early as 1800, Valenciennes’ influential treatise on landscape painting advised the artist to make assiduous study of the forest: “The forests of France are another vast field offering detail studies for the landscape artist . . . those of Ardennes, Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Villers-Cotterets and Navarre” (Valenciennes 1800, p. 626).
Corot began to sketch and paint in the Forest of Fontainebleau in 1822, when he entered the studio of Michallon. He visited the forest more frequently after his first trip to Rome and in the 1830s a number of his Salon paintings were set there. During this period, Corot would usually stay at the village of Chailly-en-Brière where there was growing community of artists. In later years, he often stayed at Ganne’s Inn in what became the artists’ colony of Barbizon.
Like several other graphite and ink drawings that Corot made in the forest in the early-mid 1830s, this work places great emphasis on the structure of the trees while also suggesting the density and complexity of the forest motif. Contours and diagonal hatching distinguish trunks and branches from the masses of foliage, with thicker, darker lines articulating key branches and points of connection. Clearly a working study, this drawing would have been used by Corot in conceiving large formal compositions for the Salon.
10. View of Paris from the North-East, c. 1830–35
Graphite and watercolor on paper 13 × 19½ inches (33.0 × 49.5 cm) provenance Private Collection, Paris.
This carefully delineated combination of landscape and townscape depicts an outdoor tavern with figures serving, waiting for service, or departing for the city. Sharply rendered buildings interspersed with poplar trees define the extensive mid-ground space, while identifiable Parisian monuments rise against the sky in the distance. From left to right are the dome of the Val de Grace, the dome of the Pantheon, which sits high on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and Notre Dame. Two large trees in the foreground left of center establish the scale and spatial distances between the scene’s many elements.
The relationship between the monuments and the elevated topography of the foreground suggest that the point of view for this drawing is from Belleville. Seen at the right are the windmills of Montmartre. An engraving of c. 1815 after a drawing of Père Lachaise cemetery by Courvoiser-Voisin shows at a distance the same configuration of monuments.
Located north-east of central Paris, and now occupying much of the 20th arrondissement, Belleville was an independent commune until 1860. From the late 18th century, it was also known to Parisians as one of the villages just outside the Paris tax barrier where wine could be purchased much more cheaply than inside the city, giving rise to rustic wine taverns called “guinguettes.” It appears from the contents of the foreground—the two wooden barrels on the left; the woman carrying a tray toward three seated figures; and the standing, aproned figure—that the subject is one of these simple wine taverns.
This drawing is particularly striking in the way it composes and renders its view according to the lessons Corot had learned during his first trip to Italy from1825– 1828. In Corot’s own estimation, his studies of the Roman cityscape viewed from the elevated, landscaped viewpoint of the Farnese gardens were the great achievements of that sojourn and among the very best works of his career. In fact, he bequeathed two such oil studies to the Louvre. As in many of Corot’s drawings of the Roman countryside, the present drawing sets up effective contrasts and spatial dynamics between the large, open foreground and the tight rendering and complex incidents of the mid-and background, crowned by the city in the far, high distance.
continued
Courvoisier-Vosion, Père Lachaise from the Gothic Chapel, c. 1815, Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
Vincent Van Gogh, Guinguette Montmartre, 1886, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
The inclusion of important, relatively large figures in this drawing, the use of color, and the carefully elaborated spatial relationships point to a date in the 1830s. During this period, Corot approached the outdoor study in both oil and graphite with greater pictorial ambition. Figures became more common, elements were placed with increasing deliberation, and relationships between the fore-, mid-, and background became increasingly dynamic and effective. Jardin Farnese, 1827, Private Collection
The Forum from the Farnese Gardens, c. 1829, Musée du Louvre, Paris 11. Little Girl Asleep, c. 1830–35
Verso: Study of a Kneeling Woman Graphite on paper 7½ x 6½ inches (19 x 16.5 cm)
This disarmingly direct and spontaneous study of a sleeping child belongs to a period in which Corot, following his return from Italy, drew and painted a number of portraits of family and close friends. The young girl in our drawing may be a member of Corot’s sister’s family. Annette-Octavie Sennegon had seven children, four of them girls, whom provided Corot with some of his favorite subjects.
The child’s physiognomy strongly resembles that of a finished drawing of a sleeping little girl now in London (Head of a Sleeping Girl, Courtauld Institute, 1952.RW.3136). In both drawings, the figure boldly fills the sheet. The most careful mode of rendering is reserved for the face. The contours are decisive and the shading that frames the face, and hand, in our work, consists of frank, diagonal hatching.
As Germain Bazin has written, Corot’s depictions of children often adopt a style that aims to capture the supposed innocence of his subject. In this sheet, details such as the awkward angle of the arm and the unbroken, curving contour line that connects the bonnet to the arm exemplify this kind of deliberate naïvete.
above: Verso: Study of a Kneeling Woman left: Head of a Sleeping Girl, c. 1830s, Courtauld Institute, London
12. The Banks of the Seine at Rouen, View from the Grand Cours, 1833
Graphite on paper 1 5 ⁄8 × 7½ inches (13 × 19 cm) Inscribed bottom right: Lundi 19 août/ endroit de l’exercice des conscrits et des voyous Signed on the mount lower right: Alfred Robaut Inscribed and dated by an unknown hand on the mount lower left: . . . . (illeg) 1861
Private Collection, Rouen
Corot recorded this view of Rouen from a well-known promenade called the Grand Cours or Cours de la Reine. Tourist guides from the 1820s and 1830s describe the promenade’s lush alleys of elms, depicted at left, the steamboats in the Seine, the clusters of houses and commercial buildings, and the elegant spire and towers of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Rouen.
The drawing is related to a painting that Corot exhibited at the 1834 Salon. Submitted under the title Une marine, the painting is also known as Les Quais Marchands de Rouen (The Merchants’ Quays at Rouen, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen). In a letter of February 26, 1833, Corot described this work as a depiction of the Rouen quays: “j’ai mis en train une marine rouennaise. C’est sur une toile de cinq pieds et demi, c’est composé de petits navires, deux fabriques chaumières et de fonds. Si Ruysdael et Van de Velde voulaient m’aider, cela ne me nuirait pas.” (“I’ve started a Rouen seascape. It’s on a canvas of five and a half feet, it’s composed of small ships, two cottage factories, and a background. If Ruysdael and Van de Velde wanted to help me, that wouldn’t hurt.”) (Paris, Ottowa and New York, p. 111).
In the 1820s and 1830s Corot made several trips to Normandy, travelling, drawing, and painting in the region around Rouen and sometimes further afield. He would stay with the Sennegons, who lived in the village of Bois-Guillame just outside the city. In 1833 he visited Normandy twice. Corot’s correspondence places him at the Sennegons’ at Bois-Guillame in
Les Quais Marchands de Rouen, 1834, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen
January and February and in various locations in Normandy in July and August. A letter of August 11 was written from Granville, on the channel coast, and the present drawing dates from just over a week later. Corot would have had to pass through Rouen on his way back to Paris, and the city may have been his last stopover on this particular journey.
Corot’s reference to the 17th century Dutch masters is evident in the composition, tonality and focus of the Salon painting. In addition, the painting emphasizes the commercial activity of the Rouen quays, while our drawing is a more a topographical portrait. In this regard, and in its fresh, spontaneous character as a study drawn on site, the sheet is also related to a panoramic view of Rouen that Corot painted between 1829 and 1834 (Rouen Seen from the Hills Overlooking the City, R II, no. 236, The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). The panoramic study takes it point of view from a road in the hills, southeast of the spot where Corot sketched the drawing. Rouen Seen from the Hills Overlooking the City, c. 1829–1834, The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford 13. Seated Camaldolese Monk, 1834
Graphite on paper 12¾ x 10½ inches (32.5 x 26.5 cm) Inscribed upper left: trésorier des Camaldules, près Florence (“treasurer of the Camaldolese, near Florence”)
This finely observed, precisely rendered study of a seated monk in profile is characteristic of Corot’s best portrait drawings of the 1830s, and most probably dates from Corot’s second trip to Italy. This was a relatively short, six-month trip which included Corot’s only visit to Tuscany and Florence. Corot focused on picturesque sites, views and figures that would serve him in composing Salon paintings. The sitter’s white habit, leather belt, as opposed to a cord, and long beard confirm the inscription which identifies him as a member of the Camaldolese offshoot of the Benedictines. An ascetic order founded by San Romualdo in 1046, the name derives from their 11th century hermitage in the Camaldoli mountains, located in the Casentino valley in Tuscany. The siting of the hilltop monastery and the magnificent views surrounding it would have been attractive to Corot, who may have spent the night there, as the hermitage offered free lodging to male visitors during this period.
Throughout his career Corot depicted monks in various habits and engaged in absorbing activities, such as reading or playing the cello. The earliest is a painting that dates from Corot’s first trip to Italy (Italian Monk Reading, Robaut I, no. 105, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo). One of Corot’s sketchbooks from his 1834 trip includes numerous drawings of monks (Musée du Louvre, Paris, from Carnet 37: RF 8714, 24; 8714, 42; 8714, 44; 8714, 25).
The drawing provides an exquisitely detailed record of the monk’s face in particular, along with his habit, hairline and beard. It is closely related to Corot’s Salon painting of 1840, A Monk (Musée du
A Monk, 1839–40, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Monk in White, Seated, Reading, c. 1857, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Louvre, Paris, RF 1609), and even more closely related to a group of paintings of seated, reading monks in a white habits which are believed to date from the 1850s and 1860s (Monk in White, Seated, Reading, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 2604; Seated Monk Reading, R III, no. 1332, Bührle Collection, Zurich; Monk in White, Reading, Private collection, New York, in Paris, Ottowa and New York 1996, figs.104 a and 104b, p. 244). Seated Monk Reading, 1865, R III, no. 1332, Bührle Collection, Zurich 14. Detail of a Doorway, The Grange of Madame Barbier, Villiers-le-See, c. 1830–35
Graphite on paper 6½ x 3¾ inches (15.9 x 9.5 cm) Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a Inscribed in graphite lower center: Porte de la Grange de Madame Barbier/ à Villiers-le-See provenance Corot sale 1875; Purchased from Julius Weitzner, 1961.
Collection of Roy and Cecily Langdale Davis, New York
One of Corot’s occupations during his first trip to Italy was the study of architectural subjects. Among his brilliant oil sketches from that era are luminous studies of the monuments of the Roman forum and the Coliseum. Following this trip, Corot devoted further study to architectural monuments in the precise medium of graphite. The best known example is a drawing from 1830 of part of the west façade of Chartres Cathedral (Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 23335) which served Corot in the execution of his famous painting, The Cathedral of Chartres (1830, retouched 1872, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 1614). Corot worked at Chartres in the company of an architect, Pierre-Achille Poirot (1797–1852), whom he had met in Tivoli in 1827, and one wonders if Poirot accompanied Corot further on his travels during the summer of 1830.
Chartres was just the first stop on Corot’s1830 travel itinerary, which began in July, prompted by the outbreak of Revolution in Paris. Corot continued north to Normandy and Picardy, and his Normandy stops may have included Villiers-le-See, also called Villiers-le-Sec, in the Calvados region. It is in the context of this journey that Robaut places a graphite study of Caen Cathedral and dates it c. 1830 (R IV, no. 2646, illus. Robaut I, p. 54), an approximate date for the present sheet as well.
15. Cutting Down a Tree in the Forest of Fontainebleau, c. 1835
Verso: Landscape Brown ink on paper 5 9½ x 14 ⁄8 inches (24 x 37 cm) Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a provenance Corot sale 1875; Sale, Paris, Audap, November 13, 1985. literature R IV, no. 2683, p. 77 (reproduced as ‘Fontainebleau, c. 1835’).
Private Collection
This compelling sheet is comprised of two apparently independent studies: that of a reclining boy, and a large study of a felled tree with two loggers sawing the trunk. Robaut dated the drawing c. 1835, an era in which Corot’s assiduous studies in the forest of Fontainebleau served him in composing his large Salon compositions when he returned to his studio in the colder months. This drawing offers a rare example of detailed study by Corot of figures and activities in the forest.
In a letter dated August 22, 1835, Corot informed his friend, the painter Charles-Claude Bachelier, that he was canceling a trip to Italy due to a cholera epidemic, and was setting off for Fontainebleau. He invited Bachelier to join him: “Work carefully . . . draw firmly and truly,” he wrote. “The aspect of the true color, coming directly from your eye, without thinking of any painting. We come back to that soon enough in the studio” (Robaut I, p. 75).
In fact the drawing does not appear to relate to a specific painting, though several later paintings by Corot include small, incidental depictions of loggers. Tree-felling and the deforestation of the ancient forest of Fontainebleau was later addressed by some artists, most notably Rousseau, as a deplorable act of modern destruction. By contrast, Corot’s attitude—at least during this period—seems to have been that of a neutral observer.
16. Saint-Germain-en-Laye, North-East Pavilion, Alleys and Petite Terrace, 1840
Graphite on paper 3 12½ x 18 ⁄4 inches (31.5 x 48 cm) Signed and inscribed lower right: L St. Germain/ Juillet 1840
Private Collection, Versailles
This fascinating drawing of the gardens and part of the château at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is dated July 1840. Though not directly related to any known painting, its 17th century architectural mood brings to mind Corot’s study of the Château of the Duchesse de Berry at Rosny-sur-Seine, also executed onsite in July of 1840, probably during the same excursion. Both Rosny, about 33 miles from Paris, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, about 20 miles from Paris, lie west of Paris on the same route along the Seine. Corot dedicated his study of the Château at Rosny to Madame Osmond, his close friend and hostess at Rosny, where he stayed every July during this period.
Corot’s rendering documents an aspect of the château at Saint-Germain-en-Laye that no longer exists: the corner pavilions designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646–1708) in the mid-17th century.
Originally a 12th century fortress, most of the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was rebuilt in 1539 during the reign of Francois I. In the mid-17th century, Louis XIV, who had been born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1638, expanded the building by replacing the five turrets on the corners with five much larger pavilions, designed by Mansart. Corot’s drawing shows part of one of these pavilions, situated at the north-east corner of the building, as well as view of the gardens facing east, in the direction of Paris. The vista, with its grandly receding alleys of trees, terminates in the distance in a broad alley, the Allée Henri IV, and a raised terrace, the Petite Terrace, which served as a long promenade and belvedere. These grounds are also a 17th century artifact, designed and installed from 1668 to 1675 by Louis XIV’s
Chateau de Rosny, 1840, Musée du Louvre, Paris garden designer, André Le Nôtre (1613–1700). It was Le Nôtre’s alleys of trees and geometric parterres, and the views of the gardens and the Seine valley from raised terraces, that attracted visitors during the era in which Corot made this drawing. The château itself was used as a military penitentiary at the time. Corot’s drawing places the viewer in the ideal position from which to apprehend the gardens as originally intended by its designers: on axis and from an elevated viewpoint.
Mansart’s pavilions were removed during the Second Empire, sometime after 1862, when the façade was extensively restored—“put back somewhat ruthlessly,” in the words of Anthony Blunt—to its appearance under François I (Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, New Haven, p. 53). The post-1862 façade, with rounded turrets rather than polygonal pavilions, greets Saint-Germain-en- Laye’s visitors today. As with many large-scale demolition and restoration projects undertaken during the Second Empire, the reworking of the façade at Saint-Germain- en-Laye was recorded by photographer Charles Marville (1816–1878/9). One of the prints (Musée d’Archéologie nationale at Saint-Germain-en-Laye) offers a last look at Mansart’s north-east pavilion, and an oblique view of Le Nôtre’s stately prospect of trees, alleys, and distant terrace. Charles Marville, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, North-East Pavilion, c. 1862, Musée d’Archéologie nationale at Saint- Germain-en-Laye
Anonymous, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, North Façade, recent photo 17. The Calvary on the Côte de Grace, Honfleur, c. 1845
Graphite on gray paper heightened with white chalk 1 8½ x 15 ⁄8 inches (21.6 x 38.5 cm) provenance Eugène Boudin; Thence by descent; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2003).
Private Collection
Although Corot began working in Normandy as early as 1822, and in Honfleur by1824 , only four painted views of the city itself are recorded by Robaut (R II, nos. 223, 224, 224bis, 240). These works were probably executed during the summer of 1829 or 1830, on one of two painting trips to the area made by Corot with his friend, the painter Remy.
The Côte de Grace is located just west of Honfleur, and was frequented by Corot and other artists of the period including Johan Jongkind, Eugène Boudin—who owned this drawing— and the young Claude Monet. Like Corot, these artists would stay at the local inn, the Ferme Saint Siméon (which still exists today), to paint the surrounding views of the landscape and the coast.
Robaut records three painted views of the Côte de Grace. Two were executed in the years 1829–30: the first (R II,224 b) is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the second (R II, 224), is unlocated. A third painting (R II, 402) titled La Côte de Grace, près Honfleur—Grands arbres dominant la mer, depicts the coast from the other side, as it is seen in this drawing, and is dated by Robaut c. 1845.
Based on style, this drawing was probably executed around the time of the second Normandy trip in 1845.
Honfleur: Calvary on the Côte de Grace, The Calvary at Honfleur, recent photo 1830, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
18. Landscape with Figure, c. 1850
Charcoal and brown conte crayon on paper 7 6 ⁄8 × 12 inches (17.5 × 30.5 cm) Signed lower left provenance Private Collection, United States, as of 1950; Jill Newhouse Gallery (1999).
Private Collection
Corot’s characteristic ‘late manner’ emerges in both his painting and drawing around 1850. The painting that seems most to announce the combination of misty, vaporous atmosphere and emphasis on tonal gradations rather than separate hues is the immensely successful Une matinée, La Danse des Nymphes (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) of the Salon of 1850–51.
The aims and methods of Corot’s drawing also changed in a number of ways during this period. Corot, along with other artists of this era, increasingly saw drawing as an opportunity for creating complete, ‘finished’ landscape compositions, rather than as part of a larger process of study and notation. This development was partly encouraged by changes in the market for landscape art, but for Corot in particular, drawing also provided a special opportunity to develop and explore certain aesthetic priorities that were of increasing importance to him. Corot addressed his motif in terms of form and what he constantly referred to as ‘value’— relative degrees of light and dark: “The first two things to study are the form, then the values. For me, those are the mainstays of art . . . ” (c. 1865–70, R IV, no. 3118, in Carnet B, fol. 3).
In the present sheet, Corot effectively articulates and unifies foreground, middle-ground and background through alternating bands of light and shadow, indicated by soft gradations of velvety charcoal. Charcoal and other soft media like conte, allowed Corot to blend, stump and merge forms into a harmonious unity of tone and medium.
The contents of the drawing are typical of many of Corot’s later compositions in both drawing and painting. A small, single figure stands next to a windblown tree—both signs of solitude and reverie. The landscape is viewed at a distance and the space in the foreground is left empty. Corot has created a souvenir, or memory, of a landscape; no specific place is indicated and no point of scenic interest is described in detail.
19. Lamentation of Christ, c. 1850–55
Graphite on paper 8 x 12 inches (20.5 x 30.5 cm) Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a provenance Corot sale 1875; Sale, Piasa, Paris, December 17, 2010.
Private Collection
This dynamic compositional study dates from a period in which Corot was actively seeking official commissions for large, religious paintings. Though not a study for any known painting, the sheet is related in date and purpose to Corot’s first and only official commission,The Baptism of Christ (1845–47, Church of Saint-Nicholas-du-Chardonnet, Paris), and to Saint Sebastian in a Landscape (1853, reworked 1873, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) of the 1853 Salon.
One of Corot’s sketchbooks, dated 1845–50 by the Louvre, includes two compositional sketches of religious subjects, both from the life of Christ: Rest on the Flight into Egypt and Lamentation (RF 8726.59). Interestingly, the sketches frame the composition with an arched top—the format of The Baptism of Christ and of St. Sebastian as well before Corot retouched it in 1873.
The present sheet is considerably larger, more detailed, and more resolved than the sketchbook drawing, and probably post-dates it. Corot’s facility with quick, expressive lines and reinforced contours, applied with varying degrees of pressure, is an aspect of his drawing practice which emerges in the early 1850s. Though the drawing could have been made either before or after Saint Sebastian, a date before the painting may be more likely. In revisiting the subject of the lamentation, now with a stronger emphasis on the Virgin cradling Christ’s upper body in her arms, Corot began to focus on the theme of a suffering, reclining man being comforted by women.
far left: Saint Sebastian in a Landscape, 1853, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore left: Lamentation of Christ, c. 1845–55, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 8726.59
20. The Destruction of Sodom, c. 1857
Charcoal on light brown paper 10¼ × 17 inches (26.1 × 43.2 cm) Signed lower right provenance Constant Dutilleux, Arras (from c. 1857 to before 1865); to Alfred Robaut, Arras; Private Collection, Paris; Sale, Christie’s London, July 8, 2008, lot 136; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2008). literature R IV, no. 2909, p.1965.
Private Collection
This vigorously handled charcoal drawing is described by Robaut as a souvenir of Corot’s Salon painting of 1857, The Destruction of Sodom (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Robaut also notes that Corot executed the drawing while visiting his friend and acolyte, and Robaut’s father-in-law, the painter Dutilleux.
The Destruction of Sodom seems to have held great importance to Corot. He first submitted a version of this painting under the title L’Incendie de Sodome to the Salon jury in 1843 but it was rejected. Subsequent protests from critics convinced the jury to accept the work for the 1844 exhibition, unchanged but with a new title, La Destruction de Sodome. An engraving published in L’Illustration in March of 1844 documents the first state of the painting.
In the 1857 version of the painting, Corot has removed much of the upper sky and most of the landscape and city walls at the right and placed much greater emphasis on the foreground figures and their immediate surroundings. The angel leading Lot and his daughters has lost its wings; the arm of Lot’s wife is lowered, and a large, empty cistern provides an effective backdrop for the figures’ flight. This evident interest in the figure as a fulcrum for the content of the landscape is evident in Corot’s other submissions to the 1857 Salon, as well as in those to the 1859 Salon. The revised Destruction of Sodom conveys movement in a more effective, concentrated way, while the boldly gestural charcoal drawing captures with power and elegance this sense of cataclysmic change and dynamic movement.
At least two other drawings by Corot are related to his 1857 Destruction of Sodom. One is found in a letter of March 1, 1857, to his young friend, the painter Edouard Brandon, then in Rome (Robaut I, p. 169, illus.). The letter includes Corot’s sketches of several of the paintings that he planned to show at the Salon in June. In addition, Corot’s unpublished Carnet no. 56 (no illustration available) contains a study and perhaps a summary sketch related to the evolving composition of 1857.
Interestingly, Robaut documents another charcoal drawing, Nymph Disarming Love (R IV, 2885, p. 65, illus.) as also having been executed for Dutilleux in Arras in around 1857. The latter, like the present drawing, is a souvenir of one of Corot’s 1857 Salon paintings (Nymph Disarming Love, Musée d’Orsay). Corot’s visits to Arras in both 1856 and 1857 are documented, and it is possible that Robaut, who first met Corot in1852 , witnessed the creation of these drawings. The Destruction of Sodom, 1857, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 21. Study of Two Figures for “La Toilette,” c. 1858
Pen and brown ink, brown wash on paper 11 × 8 inches (27.9 × 20.3 cm) Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a provenance Corot sale 1875; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2005).
Private Collection
This pen-and ink study for the two figures inLa Toilette, Corot’s superb Salon painting of 1859 (Private Collection), offers an interesting view of Corot’s process of composing a landscape with large figures. From the 1850s, Corot rendered his landscapes in a loose, approximate manner, while his figures retained a strong sense of solidity and definition. His preparatory work for La Toilette, in which the landscape serves as a stage for the nude woman and the servant who helps her dress, attests to the challenges that Corot faced in tackling these themes.
A graphite sketch from a notebook in a private collection shows the figures in the same position as the painting, with the bather seated to the right and her attendant standing at left. The present sheet documents an earlier idea for the painting while elaborating on the relationships between the figures and the landscape elements. Here, Corot establishes the vertical dynamics of the composition by posing the main figure, the nude, in a standing position, while the sinuous lines of the tree behind her echo and anchor her graceful form. At this stage, Corot envisaged two minor figures in the landscape, which he resolved in the painting as a reader leaning against a smaller tree in the background. A few quick strokes of the brush and wash mark the pond at the edge of the foreground and join it to the contours of the bather’s body.
While Corot’s charcoal drawings of this era emphasize tonal gradations, his work in pen and ink showcases his expressive use of line. The movement of the artist’s hand to paper— rhythmic, deliberate, and improvisational—lends a powerful sense of intention to this work.
In addition to the notebook study for the figures ofLa Toilette (R IV, Carnet fol. 17, recto), some brief notebook
La Toilette, 1859, Private Collection sketches for the painting are now in the Louvre (RF 18701/08728) and the Musée Carnavalet (DO 3593). Corot sketched the composition of La Toilette, alongside a sketch of his other Salon painting of 1859, Dante and Virgil, in a letter to the painter Édouard Brandon on November 27, 1858 (Robaut I, p. 192, illus.). The sketch shows the figures in the same positions as the final painting, which would suggest a date no later than 1858 for the present sheet. A charcoal ricordo after the completed painting, which Corot made for his friend and protégé Dutilleux, is now in the Louvre (RF 8817). Nymphes dans un bois ou la toilette, Musée du Louvre, Paris 22. Sketchbook (Animal and figure studies, landscape studies in Isigny), c. 1860
Graphite on paper 5 3½ x 5 ⁄8 inches (8.9 x 14.1 cm) Small oblong folio, 22 leaves Estate sale wax seal on recto of upper board center: Lugt 3905 Estate sale stamp on folio 3: Lugt 460a Sticker numbered 63 and dated 1860 on front upper board, upper right Numbered 48 on recto of end board, in red chalk Vendor’s sticker, Papétrie Gérard, Rue du Faubourg St. Denis 78, Paris, inside upper board provenance Corot sale 1875, part of no. 571 (72 sketchbooks); Anonymous sale, Drouot Rive Gauche, Paris, Nov. 26, 1976, no. 135 (?); The Ian Woodner Family Collection, by 1993; Sale, Christie’s New York, May 27, 1993, no. 146; Sale, Sotheby’s New York, April 18, 2007, no. 166. literature R IV, no. 3085, p. 94, Carnet no. 48.
Private Collection
In 1872, as part of his ongoing documentation of Corot’s oeuvre, Robaut recorded seventy-five small sketchbooks and assigned numbers to seventy-two of these. The numbered sketchbooks were listed as no. 571 in the posthumous studio sale at Drouot in 1875. Robaut also noted six additional sketchbooks to which he assigned letters (A–F), five of which were given to him by Corot (R IV, p. 87). Thirty-four of Corot’s sketchbooks, formerly in the collections of Robaut and Moreau-Nélaton, are now in the Louvre. It is likely that many of the remaining sketchbooks have been taken apart over the years.
The present example consists of sketches of a variety of landscape motifs including notations of particular locations, such as a site near Fontainebleau and “herbager d’Isigny,” a pasture in Isigny-sur-mer, a canton in the Calvados region of Normandy. The many studies of cattle and horses from different points of view may well be from Isigny as well. Several pages present idyllic landscape compositions, some of which may well have been inspired by stage sets for the opera and theater. As with many of Corot’s later albums, this one includes sketches of figures in stage costume and studies of women seated in loges and standing, dressed in long capes and other formal attire. One of the most detailed drawings is a study of a peasant woman in profile (folio3 ) who shares the page with the back of a male peasant.
Robaut’s catalogue mentions one painting from this era representing Isigny or its envrions, Two Peasants Talking Near a Barrier (Deux paysannes causant auprès d’une barrière, R II, no.1456), though the painting does not seem to draw directly on the studies in this sketchbook. A particularly interesting notation may be found on the sketchbook’s final pages:1894 - legros / figures intérieur église. This must refer to one of Alphonse Legros’s immensely well-regarded paintings of church interiors with worshipping figures, examples of which appeared at several different Salons in the1860 s.
23. Moonlit Landscape, 1862
Charcoal, stumping, and scratching heightened with white on light brown paper 5 3 18 ⁄8 × 13 ⁄8 inches (47.3 × 33.9 cm) Signed and dated at bottom: 1862/ 1 Août/ Corot provenance Anonymous Sale, Berlin, October 29, 1925, lot 226; Sale, Christie’s New York, January 22, 2003, lot 113; Arturo Cuéllar and Jill Newhouse Gallery (2003).
Private Collection
This dramatic drawing, signed and dated by Corot in August of 1862, was probably done at Ville d’Avray in the company of his sister and her husband. It is a variation on a compositional theme that Corot developed from the late 1840s through the 1850s and early 1860s. The image is dominated by tall trees, framed in a vertical format that emphasizes the trees’ height and the graceful lines of the trunks. Simple masses of feathery foliage or silhouetted hills indicate fore-, mid- and background space, which the viewer traverses through Corot’s modulation of tone. The forms and atmosphere of Corot’s landscape emerge through a variety of marks and textures which hold our attention yet seem on the verge of fading, like ghosts, into an imaginary, ambiguous distance.
The drawing is closely related to another sheet of nearly the same size, now in the Louvre, Le Sommeil de Diane of 1865 (Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 23334). Both are executed on tinted light brown paper, with stumping, scratching and white heightening, and depict a moonlit view through two trees in a vertical format with a small figure to one side. The Louvre sheet, according to Robaut’s inscription, is one of two ricordi that Corot made in July of 1865, after two panel paintings that he completed that year to decorate the dining room of Prince Demidoff in Paris. The comparison demonstrates the degree to which Corot’s later practice used free improvisation with his media applied to a set of compositional themes, subjects, and formats.
Le Sommeil de Diane, 1865, Musée du Louvre, Paris
24. Lady with Long Hair in Profile, c. 1870
Graphite on paper 6½ x 5½ inches (16.8 x 13.9 cm) Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a provenance Corot sale 1875; Sale, Christie’s London, November 21, 1996.
Private Collection
While Corot drew and painted figures throughout his career, he painted more figures in the 1860s and 1870s than at any other time. Many of these are bust-length depictions of female models in Italian costume whose poses, dress, and frequently idealized features are meant to invoke the works of Raphael and Leonardo. The present sheet, though not directly related to a particular painting that we can identify, belongs to this world of Renaissance-inspired half- length figures. On the one hand, the individual traits of the model’s profile are observed and recorded with great specificity, while the neckline, costume, and three-quarter orientation of the body from the shoulders downward invoke the c. 1500 atmosphere of works such as Woman with a Pearl (La Femme à la Perle, c. 1860–68, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 2040), and the later Sibylle (c. 1870–73, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 29.100.565).
Many of Corot’s half-length figures from this era openly declare their sources of inspiration. The Woman with a Pearl, for example, refers directly to Leonardo’s La Giaconda (Mona Lisa) in the Louvre, and to a drawing by Raphael also in the Louvre, while the pose of the woman in Sibylle is based on the Raphael’s Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, which Corot would have known from engravings. It is tempting to speculate that the present work may have some source in Leonardo’s large cartoon for the portrait of Isabella d’Este, which entered the Louvre in 1860 (MI 753), became quite well known, and was reproduced in an engraving by Alphonse Leroy between 1860 and 1880.
Corot occasionally exhibited his later figures in public venues. He also displayed these works in his studio alongside his landscape paintings and they came to be known by a small
Sibylle, c. 1870–73, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Leonardo da Vinci, Isabella d’Este, Musée du Louvre, Paris
number of dealers and collectors who sought them out. One such collector was the art critic Arsène Houssaye, who purchased several half-length studies by Corot during the artist’s lifetime and at the posthumous studio sale. Interestingly enough, Houssaye was also the author of a monograph on Leonardo which was published in 1869. He presented Corot with an inscribed copy of this book, whose description of the drawing we know as Isabella d’Este (the sitter had yet to be identified) appears on page481 . Woman with a Pearl, c. 1860–68, Musée du Louvre, Paris 25. Landscape—Souvenir du Lac de Nemi, c. 1864
Verso: Study of Trees Charcoal on toned wove paper 9½ × 13 inches (24 × 33 cm) Signed bottom right provenance Private Collection; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2011).
Private Collection
This drawing is related to Corot’s important painting Souvenir du Lac de Nemi of 1864– 1865 (Art Institute of Chicago). This painting was one of Corot’s favorite compositions and received a great deal of attention when it was shown at the Salon of 1865. Two years later Corot submitted it to the 1867 Exposition Universelle where it was awarded a gold medal. Many of Corot’s highly finished charcoal drawings of the later years were related to Salon paintings and presented as gifts to artists and intimate friends.
According to Robaut, the composition of Nemi was often reproduced: in 1865 in an etching by Martial Pitémont; in a wood engraving by Boetzel; and in a lithograph by Pridon published in l’Artiste in which the composition was reversed. In addition, Corot himself revisited the composition several times: in an ink drawing after the painting in Autographe de Salon (R IV, no. 2980); in a large charcoal drawing (R IV, no. 2958) executed in 1864 in Arras in the company of Dutilleux; and in an 1871 cliché-verre that Corot designed in Arras in 1871 in the company of Robaut and other friends. As with several of Corot’s most compelling Salon paintings from his later years, the Souvenir du Lac de Nemi was partly informed by earlier studies and paintings directly related to Corot’s travels in Italy. The motif of a multi-trunked tree, bending its arms
Souvenir du Lac de Nemi, 1871 and expanding its foliage at the bank of a lake or stream—with the tree serving as a repoussoir for a view to a bank in the distance—dates back to a graphite and ink drawing of around 1826 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), one of the masterly studies that Corot executed at Civita Castellana, in the environs of Rome during his first trip to Italy. About twenty years later, an oil painting,Bords du Lac de Nemi (Philadelphia Museum of Art), established the spatial disposition of the composition’s main elements and pushed into the foreground, to great effect, the multi-trunked, gestural branches of the magnificent tree. Robaut dates this painting 1843–45, directly following Corot’s third and final trip to Italy, where he spent a great deal of time in and around the town of Genzano and Lake Nemi. Souvenir du Lac de Nemi, 1865, Art Institute of Chicago 26. The Ford or The Ford under the Large Tree, c. 1864
Charcoal on paper 1 3 7 ⁄8 × 11 ⁄8 inches (18 × 29 cm) Signed lower left provenance Collection Armand Doria; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2009). exhibitions Berne, Kunstmuseum, Corot, January 23–March 13, 1960, no. 134.
Private Collection
Both the composition and handling of this drawing are related to one of the most successful paintings of Corot’s career, the Souvenir de Mortefontaine of 1864 (Musée du Louvre, Paris). The painting, which appeared at the 1864 Salon, was unusually well- received by critics and the public and was purchased by Napoleon III. In the late 1860s, Corot often borrowed and adapted recognizable aspects of this composition, particularly the water reflections and bending tree, in many smaller paintings intended for private sale. The best known of these is the Batelier de Mortefontaine in the Frick Collection.
The present sheet is a rare example of a finished drawing which adapts and reconfigures aspects of the Mortefontaine composition. The rich tonal range of blacks and variety of charcoal lines and marks exemplifies Corot’s skill in this medium at the end of his career.
Batelier de Mortefontaine, c.1865–1870, Souvenir de Mortefontaine, 1864, Musée Frick Collection, New York du Louvre, Paris
27. River Landscape, c. 1865–74
Charcoal, stumping, erasure on wove paper 5 1 14 ⁄8 × 20 ⁄8 inches (37 × 51.1 cm) Signed lower left provenance Nathan Chiken, Lugano, c. 1960; Leonard and Lisa Baskin Collection; Thence by descent; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2007).
Private Collection
From the late 1860s to early 1870s, Corot executed a number of large, finished drawings in charcoal whose compositions repeat similar motifs. These are typically landscapes with low horizons, patches of river or lake in the fore- or mid-ground, and large trees with lush, indistinct masses of foliage dominating the sky. A few small, discreetly placed houses and figures and one or more cows further animate these gently bucolic scenes. Usually signed, the sheets were intended for eventual sale or reproduction and publication as lithographs through the efforts of Corot’s friends in Arras, Robaut and Charles Desavary (1837–1885).
Examples of similar drawings, such as Bent Tree by the Water (Art Institute of Chicago, 1969.20) and Landscape with Pond, Trees and Cottages (Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology), reveal comparable techniques of stumping and erasure that contribute to Corot’s careful gradations of medium and tone. Edges and objects ‘dissolve’ into a misty atmosphere of soft grays and dappled light. Corot’s deft placement of scattered, short lines and dense dots of charcoal gently break the spell of the mist and enliven the surface with the artist’s touch.
Bent Tree by the Water, c. 1860s, Art Landscape with Pond, Trees and Cottages, Institute of Chicago Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Chapel Hill
28. Landscape with Four Trees, c. 1860–70
Black chalk on wove paper 6¾ × 10½ inches (17.1 × 26.7 cm) Signed lower left Inscribed on verso label in ink: Max Liebermann/ Corot/ no 1060/ Versicherungssumme M 500 (“insurance value 500 Mark”); second label numbered: 46; third label printed: Encadrements Artistiques/ Montages de gravures/pour Amateurs/ADAM-DUPRE/119 BIS RUE FONTAINE/PARIS (Ixe); inscribed in red crayon: 42. provenance Max Liebermann, Germany; Shepherd Gallery and Jill Newhouse Gallery (2005).
Private Collection
The technique of this freely executed landscape is comparable to that of a drawing in the Louvre tentatively dated 1860–1870, Group of Figures Among Trees (Groupe de personnages parmi des arbres, RF 29944). The charcoal is applied with a light, quick hand, whose supple movements are traced in the contours of foliage and clouds, and in the graceful, animated tree trunks.
This drawing was part of the extensive collection of Barbizon and Impressionist art acquired by the German landscape painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935).
Group of Figures Among Trees, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 29944
29. Willow Grove, 1865–72
Charcoal and brown chalk heightened with white chalk on blue laid paper 7 10 ⁄8 × 17½ inches (27.5 × 44.5 cm) Estate sale stamp lower left: Lugt 460a provenance Corot sale 1875; Purchased by Alfred Robaut; Vente Hurion, June 25, 1927, lot 20v; Collection G. Petitdidier; Jill Newhouse (1989); Private Collection; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2006). exhibitions Copenhagen, n.d., loaned by G. Petitdidier. (Acc. to Robaut). literature R IV, no. 3016 (illus.).
Private Collection
Corot’s late manner landscapes have sometimes been deemed repetitive as they place similar elements within a few basic compositional formats. The arrangement of this remarkable drawing is certainly familiar: an empty foreground that slopes quickly into the midground at either the left or right edge, nudging the viewer to enter the fictive space; great masses of billowing foliage that anchor the midground and are countered by a few wispy, fragile tree trunks with bare branches; geometric indications of ‘classical’ buildings in the background—either a dome or, in this case, a series of rectangles. Yet the drawing is a distinguished example of Corot’s achievement in charcoal and soft chalk. With just the barest suggestion of contours, shading, and a few discreetly placed lines, the masses of the image somehow cohere into a landscape and become the recognizable contents of a spatial field. At the same time, the landscape is forever on the verge of dissolving, just as miraculously, into pure medium, a fine powder of subtly vibrating lights and darks, an elegant silhouette on a flat sheet of heavy laid paper.
30. Landscape, c. 1870s
Charcoal, stumping on buff paper 7 9 ⁄8 × 11¾ inches (25.0 × 30.0 cm) Signed lower left provenance Paris Art Market; Jill Newhouse Gallery (2009).
Private Collection
Two lush groups of trees and two figures form the rhyming focus of this late landscape drawing by Corot. The sheet can be instructively compared to a charcoal drawing in the Louvre that Robaut dated 1871–2, Cluster of Tress with a Goatherd (RF 8815). Both works, executed on buff paper of roughly the same size, demonstrate Corot’s mastery of a charcoal and stump technique that he developed toward the end of his life. Using the charcoal to create boldly gestural, calligraphic lines and varying densities of line and tone, he would apply the blending stump to subtly merge the edges of the landscape elements and spatial registers into an image unified by subtle shifts in values. Arlette Sérullaz has describedCluster of Trees with Goatherd as “a fine example of the scenes drawn in charcoal by Corot towards the end of his life, whereby combining dark and velvety accents, gently reworked with the stump, he was able to create landscapes whose outlines merge in a melancholy twilight atmosphere” (Sérullaz, 2007, p.80). Corot produced similar, tonally-driven effects in many of the paintings of this last phase of his life. The sophisticated tonal structure of these works was of particular interest to the group of painters and photographers from Arras who comprised Corot’s ‘second family’ in his later years: Robaut and Desavary, the first owner ofCluster of Trees with Goatherd.
Cluster of Trees with a Goatherd, c. 1870s, Musée du Louvre, Paris
31. A Horseman and Traveler on Foot Nearing Two Trees, 1874
Charcoal and black chalk on laid paper; Watermark lower center: BL in a shield 10½ x 13¼ inches (26.5 x 33.5 cm) Signed and dated lower right provenance Georges Bernheim, Paris; Paris Art Market; Jill Newhouse Gallery (1994). exhibitions New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Romanticism and the School of Nature, 2000, no. 25, p. 52, (illus.).
Private Collection
The theme of a horseman traveling through a landscape is among Corot’s favorites during the later years. Here, the cavalier is joined by a solitary figure on foot, another familiar staffage element in Corot’s work from this era. The image is dominated by two of Corot’s characteristic groupings of trees: one lush with foliage, the other slender and fragile. The drawing takes on poetic meaning in light of Corot’s death the following year.
A large, relatively detailed composition, the work is an example of the role of printmaking in Corot’s later drawing practice. Through his artist and photographer friends in Arras, Corot was introduced in the early 1850s to cliché-verre, a technique for photographically reproducing drawings made on a glass plate. This sheet is closely related to a cliché-verre that Corot probably designed in the summer of 1874, during a visit to the Arras photographer Desavary (Horseman Pausing in the Countryside, 1874, R 3220). Desavary also reproduced many of Corot’s works as photographic facsimilies, and may have intended to photograph this drawing as well. It is believed that Corot made this drawing at the same time as the cliché- verre, and retouched the charcoal with black chalk to strengthen the contrasts for Desavary’s camera (Ives and Barker, p. 52).
Horseman Pausing in the Countryside,1874, R 3220
Bibliography of Frequently Cited Works
Corot sale 1875 Catalogue des tableaux, études, esquisses, dessins et eaux-fortes par Corot, dressé par M. Alfred Robaut, artiste lithographe, et des tableaux, dessins, curiositiés diverses composant sa collection particulière. Sale cat., Hôtel Drouot, Paris, part 1, May 26–28; part 2, May 21–June 4; part 3, June 7–9.
Galassi 1991 Peter Galassi. Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical Landscape Tradition. New Haven and London, 1991.
Lugt Fritz Lugt. Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes. Amsterdam, 1921.
Paris 1975 Hommage à Corot: Peintures et dessins des collections françaises. Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, June 6-September 29, 1975, exh.cat. by Hélène Toussaint, Genviève Monnier, and Martine Servot. Paris, 1975.
Paris, Ottowa and New York 1996 Corot. Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, February 27–May 27, 1996; Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, June 21–September 22, 1996; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 29, 1996–January 19, 1997, Exhibition catalogue by Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, and Vincent Pomarède. New York, 1996.
Robaut Alfred Robaut. L’Oeuvre de Corot: Catalogue raisonné et illustré. Précédé de l’Histoire de Corot et de ses oeuvres par Étienne Moreau-Nélaton. 5 vols. Paris, 1905. Reprint ed., Paris, 1965.
Sérullaz 2007 Arlette Sérullaz (trans. By Susan Wise). Corot. Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des dessins. Paris, 2007.
Valenciennes 1800 Pierre Henri de Valenciennes. Elemens de perspective pratique à l’usage des artistes, suivis de reflexions et conseils à un élève sur la peinture et particulièrement sur le genre du paysage. Paris, 1800. Jill Newhouse Gallery Digital Editions
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