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Lot Essay
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's views of Paris are particularly rare. In 1820, before his departure for Rome, he painted Vue du vieux pont Saint Michel which already bore the hallmarks of his Italian plein-air style, and in the 1830s he painted another small series of paintings of the capital, such as le Quai des orfèvres et le Pont Saint Michel (fig. 1). However, Corot was above all a painter of the immediate surroundings of Paris, where his own native village of Ville d'Avray (now a western suburb of Paris), was located. Indeed, his principal paintings of architecture were focussed almost exclusively on sites in Italy, in particular Rome, the villages of the southern Campagna, and Venice.
In France, Corot was inspired by several provincial towns such as Honfleur, Douai, Rouen, La Rochelle and Mantes, but he was little interested in the city centres, concentrating instead on the urban periphery, where town and country met. There, the juxtaposition of prominent architectural motifs, such as city ramparts, castles or spires, with fields and rivers, afforded Corot greater compositional possibilities, which stressed above all the picturesque. In this regard, pictures such as Le chemin de Sèvres (Paris, Louvre) is highly representative, with the tree-lined Sèvres road in the foreground, leading they eye across fields towards Paris in the far distance, its monuments barely distinguishable. It is equally difficult to determine with certainty the buildings in the present lot. An old inscription suggests that it is the quai d'Ivry (today in the 13th arrondissement), or an arm of the Seine near Charenton-Le-Pont. The rectangular shape above the horizon on the left would appear to be the bell towers of Notre Dame, while the structure in the centre could be the Church of Saint Paul and Saint Louis in the Marais. Martin Dieterle and Claire Lebeau date the work to the 1830s.
The present lot shows all the originality of an artist who prefigured and would influence a whole generation after him. It announces not only plein-air painting as practised by the Impressionists, but also the subject of Paris and its environs as a favoured motif for painters such as Stanislas Lépine, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro -- but before the construction of the industrial buildings and chimneys which can be seen in paintings by these later artists, and which would displace the activities of the washerwomen seen here. This painting is therefore not only a precursor to the urban Impressionism of the industrial age, but also a memento to a city and its environs which have since long disappeared.
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Martin Dieterle and Claire Lebeau, who will include it in their next supplement to the Corot catalogue raisonné.
In France, Corot was inspired by several provincial towns such as Honfleur, Douai, Rouen, La Rochelle and Mantes, but he was little interested in the city centres, concentrating instead on the urban periphery, where town and country met. There, the juxtaposition of prominent architectural motifs, such as city ramparts, castles or spires, with fields and rivers, afforded Corot greater compositional possibilities, which stressed above all the picturesque. In this regard, pictures such as Le chemin de Sèvres (Paris, Louvre) is highly representative, with the tree-lined Sèvres road in the foreground, leading they eye across fields towards Paris in the far distance, its monuments barely distinguishable. It is equally difficult to determine with certainty the buildings in the present lot. An old inscription suggests that it is the quai d'Ivry (today in the 13th arrondissement), or an arm of the Seine near Charenton-Le-Pont. The rectangular shape above the horizon on the left would appear to be the bell towers of Notre Dame, while the structure in the centre could be the Church of Saint Paul and Saint Louis in the Marais. Martin Dieterle and Claire Lebeau date the work to the 1830s.
The present lot shows all the originality of an artist who prefigured and would influence a whole generation after him. It announces not only plein-air painting as practised by the Impressionists, but also the subject of Paris and its environs as a favoured motif for painters such as Stanislas Lépine, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro -- but before the construction of the industrial buildings and chimneys which can be seen in paintings by these later artists, and which would displace the activities of the washerwomen seen here. This painting is therefore not only a precursor to the urban Impressionism of the industrial age, but also a memento to a city and its environs which have since long disappeared.
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Martin Dieterle and Claire Lebeau, who will include it in their next supplement to the Corot catalogue raisonné.