The Romantic Movement In France

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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While Géricault, Delacroix, and other ‘Romantics’ were liberating the painting of history, poetry, and real life from the trammels of Classicism, another group of French painters was engaged in rescuing landscape painting from the deadness and artificiality which had overtaken it since the days of Poussin and Claude Lorrain.

Among the earliest of the French artists to paint Nature as she is, and not as the pedantic ‘classics’ thought she ought to be, was Jean Bapiste Camille Corot (1796-1875). Born in Paris, the son of a small linen-draper having a shop in the Rue de Bac, Corot was for eight years a commercial traveler in the cloth trade. It was not till he was twenty-six that he was reluctantly allowed by his family to abandon trade and devote himself to painting. His father made him an allowance of sixty pounds a year, and till he was nearing fifty this was practically all Corot had to live upon.

In 1822 he entered the studio of Victor Bertin (1775-1825), a painter of classical landscape so successful in his day that the French Government, attracted by his own work and that of his pupils, created a new Prix de Rome for Landscape Painting. This prize was usually carried off by Bertin’s pupils, who thus came to regard Rome as the finishing school of their artistic education. The turning-point in Corot’s life came in 1826, when he also went to Rome, and there he formed a friendship with another French painter, Aligny (1798-1871), who had some influence on his early efforts. Aligny, though a classical painter, had a much more honest feeling for Nature than most of his kind, and though his pictures are rigid in execution they show unusual carefulness in composition and detail. The early Roman paintings of Corot are distinguished by precise drawing, careful composition, and a deliberate soberness of detail, but they also have a lovely limpidity of color unequalled in the work of his contemporaries and a delicate feeling for light and air. Breaking away from the brown convention of his day, Corot painted southern landscape and architectural subjects in delicate tints of pale blues and greens, light biscuit-color and pearly greys.

For some seven or eight years Corot remained in Italy, gradually forming a style which was absolutely his own and in which, while remaining true to the actual facts of Nature, he expressed her most poetical aspects. Occasionally he also painted pictures with small figures, and these, with their precision and delicate color and subtle lighting, were nearer akin to the Dutch style of Vermeer and other seventeenth-century masters than to the accepted styles of Italian figure painting.

It is strange to think that the paintings of Corot—for which millionaires now eagerly offer thousands of pounds—were for long years utterly neglected by his contemporaries. He exhibited regularly in the Paris Salon from 1827, but his exhibits aroused neither censure nor admiration—they were simply ignored. For thirty years he never sold a picture. The first critic to notice his work was the poet Alfred de Musset, who praised his picture in the Salon of 1836, but with the exception of two favorable notices received in 1837 and 1847, he was generally as neglected by the press as by the public. It was not till he was sixty that Corot began to capture the attention of the critics and collectors.

The Romantic Movement In France (continued)