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Lot Essay
By the 1850s, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s reputation as one of the most sensitive painters of French landscape was secure. So atmospheric was the artist’s depiction of a spring morning or hazy summer afternoon, that he was lauded as instinctively connected with his natural subjects. As the critic Auguste Desplaces described in his review of the Salon of 1850-1851, ‘…nature finds in M. Corot an innocent and well informed interpreter. This is no academic tracing, no copy of earlier images: one sees a familiarity with and inspired knowledge of the subject’ (A. Desplaces, ‘Salon de 1850, ‘L’Union, 22 February 1851, pp. 119-122).
Or as Ève de Balzac pronounced with enthusiasm in a letter to Champfleury in 1851: ‘Nature seen through the eyes of a Dupré or a Corot! ...Oh, how lovely it is! ...one could not be more innately, more finely original.’ ((in translation) cited in Corot, Met 1996, p. 227. Letter April 27 1851, Quoted in Balzac, 1989, p. 14.)
Corot travelled several times to the Limousin region in the southwest of France. He painted this soporific view of a field, shimmering in the late afternoon sun, during a visit between 1845 and 1850. (P.149 Corot Met catalogue, 1996) The scene is strongly evocative of the warmth and quiet serenity of a summer afternoon. One figure rests on the grass in the foreground, while another dozes against a tree at the edge of the pasture. The shapes and forms are rendered soft and indefinite in Corot’s recognizably sketchy style. Elucidating his loose handling of paint in a note on his artistic process, Corot wrote: ‘I never hurry to arrive at details; the masses and the character of a picture interest me before anything else.’ (From a notebook of about 1848-52 cited in Corot, Met exh. 262) By refusing to give precedence to detail, Corot was able to vividly capture the dreamlike quality so admired in his landscapes. In the artist’s spontaneous brushwork, the surface of the painting is composed of thin layers of browns, greens, blues and greys, tempered with white. Beneath a milky blue sky, the scene is shrouded in a diffuse golden light which unifies the composition.
The painting is arranged in a construction highly typical of Corot’s oeuvre. Structuring the composition, as he commonly did, with the principle of planar recession, Corot draws the viewer into this bucolic scene. In the foreground, a verdant meadow is contoured by long shadows and transformed into a rich palette of greens. The mist of late afternoon light is counterbalanced by the sturdy figures of the herd which Corot colours with dark shades of brown and black. A curtain of trees darkens the middle ground and tangles into dense woodland at the edges of the composition. Beyond this, the eye is drawn deeper still, through thick honeyed air, to a glint of water in the distance.
Or as Ève de Balzac pronounced with enthusiasm in a letter to Champfleury in 1851: ‘Nature seen through the eyes of a Dupré or a Corot! ...Oh, how lovely it is! ...one could not be more innately, more finely original.’ ((in translation) cited in Corot, Met 1996, p. 227. Letter April 27 1851, Quoted in Balzac, 1989, p. 14.)
Corot travelled several times to the Limousin region in the southwest of France. He painted this soporific view of a field, shimmering in the late afternoon sun, during a visit between 1845 and 1850. (P.149 Corot Met catalogue, 1996) The scene is strongly evocative of the warmth and quiet serenity of a summer afternoon. One figure rests on the grass in the foreground, while another dozes against a tree at the edge of the pasture. The shapes and forms are rendered soft and indefinite in Corot’s recognizably sketchy style. Elucidating his loose handling of paint in a note on his artistic process, Corot wrote: ‘I never hurry to arrive at details; the masses and the character of a picture interest me before anything else.’ (From a notebook of about 1848-52 cited in Corot, Met exh. 262) By refusing to give precedence to detail, Corot was able to vividly capture the dreamlike quality so admired in his landscapes. In the artist’s spontaneous brushwork, the surface of the painting is composed of thin layers of browns, greens, blues and greys, tempered with white. Beneath a milky blue sky, the scene is shrouded in a diffuse golden light which unifies the composition.
The painting is arranged in a construction highly typical of Corot’s oeuvre. Structuring the composition, as he commonly did, with the principle of planar recession, Corot draws the viewer into this bucolic scene. In the foreground, a verdant meadow is contoured by long shadows and transformed into a rich palette of greens. The mist of late afternoon light is counterbalanced by the sturdy figures of the herd which Corot colours with dark shades of brown and black. A curtain of trees darkens the middle ground and tangles into dense woodland at the edges of the composition. Beyond this, the eye is drawn deeper still, through thick honeyed air, to a glint of water in the distance.