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Lot Essay
Painted between 1870 and 1874, and dated by the artist a year later in 1875, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Route aux abords d’une ville dans la Brie dates from the final decade of the artist’s long and distinguished career. Corot’s landscapes of this prolific period are the culmination of a lifetime’s deep love, study and devotion to the countryside of his native France. With a gentle poeticism, in Route aux abords d’une ville dans la Brie, Corot has depicted a quiet and unassuming vision of rural life in a village in la Brie, a picturesque area situated to the north west of Paris. A horse and cart travels along a tree-lined pathway – an often-used motif in Corot’s work – leading the viewer’s eye into the composition, drawn towards the hamlet that lies beyond a screen of trees. With light, feathered brushstrokes and a delicate colour palette of silvery green tones, Route aux abords d’une ville dans la Brie encapsulates Corot’s late style, exuding the sense of serenity and timelessness for which the great ‘patriarch of the landscape painters’, as he became known, was revered.
Route aux abords d’une ville dans la Brie was painted during one of the most turbulent periods in France’s history. The Franco-Prussian war and subsequent Siege of Paris brought violence and destruction to Paris and its environs. In the face of this turmoil, Corot, despite his old age, completely immersed himself in his painting. His depictions of the tranquil corners of rural France show no hint of the troubles occurring around him, but were instead painted with a resolute dedication to the truth of nature. It was this aesthetic that was enormously influential to the Impressionists, who exhibited as a group for the first time in 1874, the same year that Corot finished the present work. Working outdoors and capturing the subtle, often nuanced changes in light and weather, Corot served as an important precursor of Impressionism. For artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, his unpretentious landscapes presented a novel form of this traditional genre. Though he did not actively support the New Painting, as this stylistic tendency was known at the beginning of the 1870s, his advice to young pupils and admirers demonstrates how influential his subjective artistic approach was to the generation of young artists who followed him; he called for artists to, ‘choose only subjects that harmonise with their own particular impressions, considering that each person’s soul is a mirror in which nature is reflected in a particular fashion’ (Corot, quoted in J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism, London, 1973, p. 101).
Route aux abords d’une ville dans la Brie was painted during one of the most turbulent periods in France’s history. The Franco-Prussian war and subsequent Siege of Paris brought violence and destruction to Paris and its environs. In the face of this turmoil, Corot, despite his old age, completely immersed himself in his painting. His depictions of the tranquil corners of rural France show no hint of the troubles occurring around him, but were instead painted with a resolute dedication to the truth of nature. It was this aesthetic that was enormously influential to the Impressionists, who exhibited as a group for the first time in 1874, the same year that Corot finished the present work. Working outdoors and capturing the subtle, often nuanced changes in light and weather, Corot served as an important precursor of Impressionism. For artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, his unpretentious landscapes presented a novel form of this traditional genre. Though he did not actively support the New Painting, as this stylistic tendency was known at the beginning of the 1870s, his advice to young pupils and admirers demonstrates how influential his subjective artistic approach was to the generation of young artists who followed him; he called for artists to, ‘choose only subjects that harmonise with their own particular impressions, considering that each person’s soul is a mirror in which nature is reflected in a particular fashion’ (Corot, quoted in J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism, London, 1973, p. 101).