Word: corot
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Constable's paintings were the sensation of the 1824 Paris Salon, and their complex freshness came as a revelation to younger French artists, including the 28-year-old Corot, who was on the verge of departing for Italy. Today it's hard to imagine the delicious feelings of initiation and surrender with which foreign artists once went to Italy. Each view in Rome, every corner of Naples or Latium, seemed impregnated with meaning--by the memory of artists who had painted them before, by the presence of Antiquity and by the mellow beauty of the light. But to see Nature...
Despite his doubts--and he was a man of excessive modesty--Corot's early responses to Italy have a special place in his work, and in French art as a whole. They are small, painted on the spot and marvelously fresh, done with a truth of tone worthy of Constable. Tone, not line or color, describes the distances and shapes in these studies. Corot painted them directly, with a loaded brush, and they show an extreme sensitivity to atmosphere. Their light is clear and mild, and under it each plane in the jumble of Roman roofs and walls becomes part...
...Corot's small oils of subjects like the view from the Pincio across Santa Trinita del Monte and the panorama of Rome below, and his studies of rustic places like Civita Castellana, were never meant to be shown in public. Until 1849 none were. They were intended solely as preparations for larger studio compositions, but these rarely have the elan and directness of his first insights. For him they were triggers of memory. "After my excursions," he wrote, "I invite Nature to come and spend a few days at home with me; brush in hand, I hunt for nuts...
...Corot was lucky in having a modest private income--his parents were well-off dressmakers in Paris--and he did not need to labor constantly on the big machines that spelled success or failure at the Salons. So he could work on the studies for their own sake, and these, not the bigger works, entitle him to be seen as a true precursor of Impressionism. Many of his lithographs and etchings of landscape have the same vitality. Full of wind and weather, they show pleasure in the mark for its own sake--Corot was a terrific scribbler at his best...
...official Corot is generally a bore. The nymphs, shepherds and Sileni who decorate the big classical landscapes of his middle years are inert and stereotyped. He didn't have the temperament for the sensuousness Poussin put in his classical scenes; Corot's nymphs are just studio models. In Bacchante with a Panther, 1860, the girl teasing the big cat with what appears to be a dead starling looks like Mlle. Goosepimple, thanks to the gray French skies above and the damp earth under her bottom...