Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
French, 1796-1875
Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796. His family were bourgeois people—his father was a wigmaker and his mother a milliner. After his parents married, they bought the millinery shop where his mother had worked and his father gave up his career as a wigmaker to run the business side of the shop. The store was a famous destination for fashionable Parisians and earned the family an excellent income. Corot was the second of three children born to the family, who lived above their shop during those years.
Corot received a scholarship to study at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen, but left after having scholastic difficulties and entered a boarding school. He "was not a brilliant student. . During those years he lived with the Sennegon family, whose patriarch was a friend of Corot's father and who spent much time with young Corot on nature walks. It was in this region that Corot made his first nature paintings. With his father's help, he apprenticed to a draper, but he hated commercial life and despised what he called "business tricks", yet he faithfully remained in the trade until he was 26, when his father consented to his adopting the profession of art. For a short period between 1821 and 1822, Corot studied with Achille Etna Michallon, a landscape painter of Corot's age who was a protégé of the painter Jacques-Louis David and who was already a well-respected teacher. Michallon had a great influence on Corot's career. With his parents' support, Corot went to Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance and to draw the crumbling monuments of Roman antiquity. . Corot's stay in Italy from 1825 to 1828 was a highly formative and productive one, during which he completed over 200 drawings and 150 paintings. During the six-year period following his first Italian visit and his second, Corot focused on preparing large landscapes for presentation at the Salon. Corot also did some portraits of friends and relatives, and received his first commissions. He typically painted two copies of each family portrait, one for the subject and one for the family, and often made copies of his landscapes as well.
During his two return trips to Italy, he visited Northern Italy, Venice, and again the Roman countryside. In 1835, Corot created a sensation at the Salon with his biblical painting Agar dans le desert (Hagar in the Wilderness). The background was likely derived from an Italian study. He followed that up with other biblical and mythological subjects, but those paintings did not succeed as well. 1837, he painted his earliest surviving nude, The Nymph of the Seine. Later, he advised his students "The study of the nude, you see, is the best lesson that a landscape painter can have. If someone knows how, without any tricks, to get down a figure, he is able to make a landscape; otherwise he can never do it.
Through the 1840s, many of Corot's works were flatly rejected for Salon exhibition, nor were many works purchased by the public. While recognition and acceptance by the establishment came slowly, by 1845 Baudelaire led a charge pronouncing Corot the leader in the "modern school of landscape painting". In 1846, the French government decorated him with the cross of the Légion d'honneur and in 1848 he was awarded a second-class medal at the Salon, but he received little state patronage as a result. In the 1860s, Corot was still mixing peasant figures with mythological ones, mixing Neoclassicism with Realism. In later life, Corot's studio was filled with students, models, friends, collectors, and dealers who came and went under the tolerant eye of the master. Dealers snapped up his works and his prices were often above 4,000 francs per painting. With his success secured, Corot gave generously of his money and time. He became an elder of the artists' community and would use his influence to gain commissions for other artists.
Person TypeIndividual
Italian (Venetian), 1696-1770
