Word: corots
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...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...
...most self-effacing artist who ever lived. He kept his figure paintings turned to the wall and referred to them deprecatingly as "my monkeys." Of his contemporary, Painter Eugene Delacroix, he would say: "He is an eagle, and I am only a lark." But for all his modesty, Corot was a single-minded man. He flatly refused to work in his father's drapery shop, rejected the fiancee his parents selected for him, even refused to marry at all. All that Corot ever really wanted to do was paint...
Though he felt himself surrounded by his superiors, he acknowledged no master. "No one has taught me anything," he said. The classical influence of Poussin was there, but Corot could not treat a landscape as if it were a stage: he insisted on painting his landscapes on the spot. "One must go to the fields," he said. "I need real branches." As he mastered his art, each outdoor scene seemed to declare -in the curves of its shadows and the softness of its light-the very time of day that it was painted. In this, above all his contemporaries, Corot...
...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...