Years of success of Camille Corot

By the 1850s collectors and dealers were eagerly seeking his pictures, and Corot henceforth had no material worries. He went on sending big pictures to the Salons, where they fetched high prices. At the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition he was awarded a first-class medal for painting, and Emperor Napoleon III bought a picture from him. In 1867 he was promoted to being an officer of the Legion of Honour. Although he was a prolific artist and painted more than 3,000 pictures, demand outran supply, and Corot was much imitated and faked. During his lifetime, Corot achieved popularity largely through his later, self-consciously poetic landscapes, which were characterized by sensitive tonal effects and a delicate range of silvery colors. The portraits and figure studies of the last 20 years of Corot’s life, such as The Studio (several versions, c. 1865) and The Pearl (1868–70), bear witness to Corot’s innate classicism and his absolute mastery of tonal painting. In the 20th century, appreciation of Corot shifted to show a marked preference for the earlier, more naturalistic sketches over these later ones.

Success made little difference to Corot, who was a man of extremely conservative habits. He always worked very hard because he loved his art, but this left him little time for other things. He liked to talk about the harmonies of his painting, and his late work in particular—both portraiture and landscape—aspires to the qualities of music. He kept the modern world firmly out of his pictures: there is never a sign of the vast railway network that covered France in his lifetime or of the industrial and commercial development that transformed the country.

Corot enjoyed the company of fellow painters and was a close friend of the Barbizon group of artists, especially Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles-François Daubigny. He used his money to give unostentatious help to less successful friends, such as the caricaturist Honoré Daumier. Without going out of his way to support them in public, Corot was sympathetic to younger painters. He gave lessons to the later Impressionists Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot and had many pupils and disciples. “Papa Corot” was universally loved for his unfailing kindness and generosity during his last years.

Legacy

Corot’s place in the history of 19th-century painting is an assured one. When he started painting, the landscape sketch was regarded primarily as raw material for more considered work and was of no great artistic consequence in itself. Corot was one of the first to show that the sketch had qualities of vitality and spontaneity, a basic truth to nature that a more finished picture lacked. At the time of his death the sketch had triumphed, and any artificiality or contrivance in landscape painting was regarded with suspicion. Corot had helped to prepare the way for the Impressionist landscape painters, who learned much from him and looked upon him with respect and veneration.