Word: corots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Floating Studio. The oldest member of the new school was Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who began painting landscapes-out of doors in 1822, when he was 26. A rover who toted his easel all over France, Italy and the Low Countries, he captured farmhouses, fishing villages, animals and people in muted colors of luminous clarity. He had a sense of structure that both Seurat and Cezanne admired, but he was more interested in the surface of nature than in its interior turbulence. His quiet scenes were sometimes a bit melancholy, sometimes vibrant with a profound...
...Corot's friend Charles Daubigny bought a boat and used it as a floating studio. He painted scenes along the coasts of France and Holland with brush strokes that became increasingly liquid, in keeping with his subjects. Critics accused him of hastening too much over solid detail, surrendering too much to vague "impressions." Writes Professor Herbert: "It was in this dispute, which revolved around his diminishing the difference between sketch and finished painting, that the battle for impressionism was first engaged...
...class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary. I might almost say, catastrophic." But Mamma Morisot was not afraid f having her daughter turn artist, and her husband, a well-to-do civil servant, was broad-minded enough about the girl to introduce her to Painter Camille Corot. The old artist happily accepted her as a pupil, took her out of the musty Louvre where she had been dutifully copying old masters. "Nature itself is the best teacher," he told...
...both his life and his art he was the epitome of contentment. In failure he did not sulk; in success he was happy to use his wealth to help out his friends, including the caricaturist Daumier, who -impoverished and nearly blind-was about to be evicted from his cottage. Corot bought another cottage for Daumier and sent along a tongue-in-cheek explanation: "It is not for you I do this; it is merely to annoy your landlord...
While his romantic contemporaries reveled in bright color and dramatic gesture, Corot serenely went his own way, seeing a world of silvery grey and feathery birches. His figures rarely show emotion, but they radiate a sense of brooding mystery (see color). If his landscapes display no flash of power, it is only because he saw the world as perpetually at peace. Corot was the unobtrusive link between French classicism and impressionism-an innovator who would not jolt. "One should," he insisted, "love the art that procures calm...