Word: corots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nineteenth century French painting has never fitted neatly into art historians' annals. It was a century of variety and contradictions, blessed with an embarrassment of riches. Every decade had its transcendent master-David, Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Corot, Manet, Cézanne-whose force of personality outshone multitudes of minor but thoroughly accomplished painters. One artistic ism followed another, as Neo-classicism yielded to Romanticism, Realism to Impressionism...
Unprejudiced View. By midcentury, the time's inherent romanticism found expression in a burst of landscape painting-and a new respect for human problems. Corot marched out of doors to paint, and the Barbizon school followed. Jean-Francois Millet captured the inherent dignity of peasant farmers, Daumier the poetry of the Parisian poor. But the overall point that the Minneapolis show makes is that 19th century French painting has too long been viewed as a vast academic conspiracy against the innovators who are now enshrined as the founders of modern art. It makes for a story of martyrs...
Winthrop's collection of Ingres, third largest in the world, is complemented by Delacroix, Corot, Daumier, and Gericault. The drawings from Blake's illustrations of Dante, including a wonderful Lucia Carrying Dante in his Sleep, and the pre-Raphelite drawings make the English drawing a contingent rival of the French. The single Van Gogh portrait drawing is my favorite...
...very mention of photography has long repelled serious easel painters, despite the fact that Corot, Cézanne and Manet all made use of the camera. Corot got the idea for his blurry landscapes from seeing an early silver print. Cézanne used photographs for his self-portraits. Manet painted his famed Execution of Emperor Maximilian from a news photograph...
Thomas Gainsborough, for example, is represented most tellingly by a flamboyant "fancy picture" (a fantasy) of a sleeping country girl. John Constable's Study for "A Boat Passing a Lock" illustrates through its snapshot organization and cavalier brushwork his influence on Delacroix, Millet and Corot. Hardly less impressive are five canvases by the provincial Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97), which range from a firelit Iron Forge to the protosurrealism of The Old Man and Death...