Beautiful Landscapes By Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Remarkable paintings from a single year by the French landscape painter
The “studies” that Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painted outdoors in the landscapes of the Italian and French countrysides were private works. They were not intended for exhibition in the Paris Salons. Yet as works of art, they were to be hugely influential for later generations of artists, and remain so, thanks to their faithfulness to natural light and sincerity of purpose that resisted the nostalgic stylisation of Neo-classical French art.
Corot’s countryside excursions, where he painted ancient aqueducts and crumbling temples under the blue skies of Italy and Provence, resulted in some of the most delicate and beautiful paintings of his career.
Successful in his own time as painter of large, nostalgic landscape works that drew upon the style of Poussin, it was his private studies that commanded the attention of the generations that followed. As Monet wrote later, “There is only one master here — Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing.”
