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| Jean Baptiste Camille Corot |
| 1796-1875 |
| European Artist |
| Corot was born in Paris, France. He entered the studio of Michallon a painter his own age who had won the first Prix de Rome for landscape painting in 1817. Corot worked at Saint-Cloud outside Paris, a common destination for young landscapists, and in the Forest of Fontainebleau, then a less obvious choice. On Michallon's death Corot moved to the studio of Jean-Victor Bertin, a much older, more conservative landscape artist. In 1825 he travelled to Italy; among his first paintings in Rome was a picture of the roofs outside his window in emulation of Valenciennes. During 1826-28, he travelled widely in the Roman campagna making drawings and plein-air oil sketches. Corot's late landscapes are among the most sought after and influential paintings of the nineteenth century; but the path he followed to this success was intensely individual. Corot combined genuine respect for classical landscape principles with a deeply felt personal vision that often gives his work a startling naiveté. His skills with a paint brush were hard won, but his incomparable eye for subtle colour variation seems to have been inborn. Corot is usually associated with the Barbizon school of landscape painters, many of whom were close personal friends, but Corot's landscapes themselves often have more in common with the seventeenth-century paintings of Poussin or the turn-of-the twentieth-century compositions of Cézanne. |
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