Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Park at Monsieur Wallet at Voincinlieu, 1866.
Oil on canvas. Collection of Lady Ridley-Tree.
Jean-Baptists-Camille Corot, View of Rome: The Bridge and Castel Sant’Angelo with the Cupola of St. Peter’s, 1826-28. Oil on paper
mounted on canvas. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco..
Corot in California – Jean-Baptists-Camille Corot at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Corot was the most absorbing, respected, and influential landscape painter in France inthe generation before Impressionism. He was much beloved by his peers and collectors alike, and remainsan important figure whose exploration of the light and poetry of the French and Italian landscape stillresonates today
July 4 – October 11, 2009
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The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is pleased to present more than a dozen paintings, plus several printsand drawings, representing the first exhibition devoted to the art of Jean-Baptists-Camille Corot (1796-1875) in California, and the first in the United States since the major survey in 1996. Drawing fromprivate and public collections, including the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the J. Paul Getty Museum,and SBMA’s own permanent collection, the presentation examines Corot’s development as an artist, fromhis first views of Rome to his late, delicately-painted landscapes, both real and ideal.
Before developing into the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-19th century, Corotoriginated from a moderately well-off family whose house in Anvers, about 20 miles southwest of Paris,remained his home for his entire career. Apprenticed to a fabric designer, Corot finally gained the courageto become a painter only at the age of 26, as he was shy and socially awkward all his life.
His first experience of Italy, from 1826 to 1828, was a critical moment for him when he captured thestrong, warm light and golden ruins with a fresh and vivid directness. Corot’s sketches in Italy have beenamong his most highly prized works for the last century. The exhibition is fortunate to include four Italiansketches as well as two other early sketches.
As he matured, Corot developed a soft, silvery light and touch that cast even his views of real places in thepoetic light of memory. Corot stated:
“What there is to see in painting, or rather what I am looking for, is the form, the whole,the value of the tones…That is why for me the color comes after, because I love more thananything else the overall effect, the harmony of the tones, while color can give a kind of shockthat I don’t like.”
These pictures, which married the classical landscape conventions of such earlier French masters as the 17th-century painter Claude Lorrain to the specifics of northern French light and scenery, were the basis ofCorot’s reputation in his own day, and avidly collected by Americans, then and to this day.
Such a strong demand for his work developed that a significant amount of forgeries were produced sixtyyears after Corot’s death. The famous quip by the Louvre curator René Huyghe is a humorouspunctuation, “Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America.”The artist’s relatively easy-to-imitate style and his encouragement of his students to copy his works; hishabit of touching up and signing student and collector copies; and his lending of works to professionalcopiers and rental agencies all contributed to the problem.
Despite the flurry of problem pictures that abound, the SBMA exhibition allows the visitor to see Corot athis best by showing only those works that are both unquestionably genuine and of the highest quality. Inthese, one is able to understand why California landscape painters have used Corot’s works as a touchstonefrom the 19th century until the present day.
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