July 16, 1796

Camille Corot (July 16, 1796 to February 22, 1875) was a French painter, of mainly landscapes and an influential figure to those who succeeded him. His parents were comfortably middle-class but he did not want to follow in his father's trade, and finally the father set up an allowance that meant his son could do the only thing that interested him: paint. Corot was an unusually focused artist. The year before the father died, his son won his country's accolade, the Legion d'Honneur.

According to a biographer, the young

Corot spent much time studying the paintings in the Louvre, .... From the beginning, however, Corot preferred to sit outdoors, rather than in studios, sketching what he saw and learning by firsthand experience....[The artist] settled into a routine to which he kept for the whole of his life. He always spent the spring and summer months painting outside, making small oil sketches and drawings from nature. He acquired a mastery of tonal relationships that formed the basis of his art, for the balance and gradation of light and dark tones was always more important to him than the choice of colour. In the winter Corot would retire to his Paris studio to work on some much larger pictures, which he liked to have ready for exhibition at the annual Salon when it opened in May.
....

Throughout his life Corot liked occasionally to paint straightforward topographical landscapes, depicting buildings such as the cathedral at Chartres (1830) or the belfry at Douai (1871) exactly as they appeared to him. But the basic division in his work was between the sketch made from nature—small, direct, spontaneous—and the large, finished picture done for the Salon. In the early 19th century the sketch was thought to be unsuitable for public exhibition, and there were only a few connoisseur collectors who would buy such pictures. The finished landscapes were preferred. These were considered even more dignified if they included a few small figures who could be identified with the heroic characters of legend, literature, or the Bible. Thus, Corot exhibited pictures with such titles as Hagar in the Wilderness (Salon of 1835), ....

As landscape was his major interest, Corot used [such] figures in his work in an incidental manner... In the 1860s Corot invented a new kind of landscape, the Souvenirs, in which he made compositions out of standardized elements—usually a lake with diaphanous trees painted in an overall silvery tonality—to evoke a mood of gentle melancholy. At the end of his life, he also painted a number of portraits and figure studies, especially of young women ....

[His career took off when] ...., in 1840, the state purchased one of his works, The Little Shepherd, and, five years later, the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire could write in his review of the 1845 Salon that “Corot stands at the head of the modern school of landscape.” .....

Here is a recognizable Corot --

Corot had determined not to marry, so dedicated was he to his art. That may explain the sedate quality of a canvas titled "Bacchante with a Panther" (1860).  Here is what I mean---

Is she holding up a cat treat? An interesting thing is the quality of passion in his work. 

Success made little difference to Corot, who was a man of extremely conservative habits. He always worked very hard because he loved his art, but this left him little time for other things. He liked to talk about the harmonies of his painting, and his late work in particular—both portraiture and landscape—aspires to the qualities of music. He kept the modern world firmly out of his pictures: there is never a sign of the vast railway network that covered France in his lifetime or of the industrial and commercial development that transformed the country.

Corot enjoyed the company of fellow painters and was a close friend ...[of other] artists, especially Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles-François Daubigny. He used his money to give unostentatious help to less successful friends, such as the caricaturist Honoré Daumier. Without going out of his way to support them in public, Corot was sympathetic to younger painters. He gave lessons to ... Berthe Morisot and had many pupils and disciples. “Papa Corot” was universally loved for his unfailing kindness and generosity during his last years.
...
Corot’s place in the history of 19th-century painting is an assured one. When he started painting, the landscape sketch was regarded primarily as raw material for more considered work and was of no great artistic consequence in itself. Corot was one of the first to show that the sketch had qualities of vitality and spontaneity, a basic truth to nature that a more finished picture lacked. At the time of his death the sketch had triumphed, and any artificiality or contrivance in landscape painting was regarded with suspicion. Corot had helped to prepare the way for the Impressionist landscape painters, who learned much from him and looked upon him with respect and veneration.


These are the words of Sir Alan Bowness the author of the Encyclopedia Britannica article from which our essay derives.