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Lot Essay
La Rencontre matinale sur les hautuers de Sèvres was painted in the early years of the 1850s, just as Corot was reaching the height of his powers and becoming recognized as the leading French landscape painter. The importance of his approach to landscape painting cannot be overstated. Often credited as the progenitor of Impressionism, Corot's method of painting en plein air drew the interest of Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Morisot and Pissarro-all of whom either experimented with Corot's technique or called themselves his ‘pupils’. Even after his death, these artists were quick to credit Corot for his groundbreaking work. On a visit to Cagnes in 1918, the dealer René Gimpel recorded Renoir's comments on Corot: ‘There you have the greatest genius of the country, the greatest landscape artist who ever lived. He was called a poet. What a misnomer! He was a naturalist. I have studied ceaselessly without being able to approach his art’ (quoted in R. Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, New York, 1966, p. 13). Van Gogh went further, praising the ‘quietness, mystery and peace’ of Corot's landscapes, and said, ‘in his works one feels Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, as well as the Gospels sometimes, yet how discreet it is, and how much, all possible modern sensations, common to us all, predominate’ (quoted in J. Leighton, ‘After Corot’, Corot, exh. cat., The South Bank Centre, London, 1991, p. 30).
The present work, almost certainly painted en plein air, depicts two figures, a man and a woman, stopping to talk along a path. The depth of the landscape is created by the deft placement of the two figures at the crest of the hill with the landscape below them dissolving into a purple-tinged mist. It is clearly early in the day, as the light has the warm, hazy tones of a spring morning. There is a serenity that pervades the composition and the viewer is invited into a world colored only by the light of the early dawn. The eye of the viewer is drawn gently through the landscape, creating the essence of the quiet French countryside on a misty morning.
These atmospheric landscapes created during the peak of the artist’s career must be viewed as representing Corot’s meditations on nature and were never meant to portray accurate depictions rooted in time and place. Writing almost contemporary to this painting, Charles Perrier observed that ‘Corot borrows from nature only its effects and, so to speak, the moral impression the view makes on us. Thus the painter himself only rarely gives his paintings the name 'landscape'. He calls them 'impression of morning', 'twilight', 'an evening', 'remembrance', all things that bear no relation to the conscientious reproduction of material objects. What he is aiming for is not the tangible form but the idea ...’ (C.Perrier, ‘Exposition Universelle des beaux-arts. X. La Peinture française. – Paysage,’ L’Artiste, 5th ser., 15, 15 July 1855, p. 143).
The present work, almost certainly painted en plein air, depicts two figures, a man and a woman, stopping to talk along a path. The depth of the landscape is created by the deft placement of the two figures at the crest of the hill with the landscape below them dissolving into a purple-tinged mist. It is clearly early in the day, as the light has the warm, hazy tones of a spring morning. There is a serenity that pervades the composition and the viewer is invited into a world colored only by the light of the early dawn. The eye of the viewer is drawn gently through the landscape, creating the essence of the quiet French countryside on a misty morning.
These atmospheric landscapes created during the peak of the artist’s career must be viewed as representing Corot’s meditations on nature and were never meant to portray accurate depictions rooted in time and place. Writing almost contemporary to this painting, Charles Perrier observed that ‘Corot borrows from nature only its effects and, so to speak, the moral impression the view makes on us. Thus the painter himself only rarely gives his paintings the name 'landscape'. He calls them 'impression of morning', 'twilight', 'an evening', 'remembrance', all things that bear no relation to the conscientious reproduction of material objects. What he is aiming for is not the tangible form but the idea ...’ (C.Perrier, ‘Exposition Universelle des beaux-arts. X. La Peinture française. – Paysage,’ L’Artiste, 5th ser., 15, 15 July 1855, p. 143).