Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

 1796-1875

French Realist Landscape Painter

Stylistically influenced by the following painters - Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jean Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Cause of Death - He died of heart failure  in Paris on February 22, 1875 and was buried at Père Lachaise.

Camille Corot Biography

Camille Corot was born in Paris on July 26, 1796, into a family of upper-class merchants and bankers. His family embraced culture and young Camille grew up surrounded by music, art and literature. He worked in the business world before dedicating himself, at the age of twenty-six, to art fulltime. Eminent art historian and author, John C. Van Dyke
 explains "though classically trained under Bertin, and though somewhat apart from the other men in his life, belongs with this group. He was a man whose artistic life was filled with the beauty of light and air. These he painted with great singleness of aim and great poetic charm. Most of his work is in a light silvery key of color, usually slight in composition, simple in masses of light and dark, and very broadly but knowingly handled with the brush. He began painting by using the minute brush, but changed it later on for a freer style which recorded only the great omnipresent truths and suppressed the small ones. He has never had a superior in producing the permeating light of morning and evening. For this alone, if for no other excellence, he deservedly holds high rank."

Corot traveled widely, sketching old ruins in Italy and Greece. According to his biographer, Mary Schell Hoke Bacon, "It is told that when he first went to study in Italy, Corot longed to transfer the moving scenes before him to canvas; but people moved too quickly for him, so he methodically set about learning how to do with a few strokes what he would otherwise have laboured over. So he reduced his sketching to such a science that he became able to sketch a ballet in full movement; and it is remarked that this practice trained him for presenting the tremulousness of leaves of trees, which he did so exquisitely."

He painted in almost complete obscurity until 1848 when he was discovered by the art world. Carot's masterpieces were soon in huge demand.  During his lifetime he donated much of his income to help the less fortunate, funding preschools, providing food for the poor and supporting struggling painters. In 1846 the French government decorated him with the cross of the Legion of Honour. He died in Paris on February 22, 1875 and was buried at Père Lachaise.
 

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot Quotations

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Leon Francois Comerre,  1850-1916

Pierre-Auguste  Cot 1837-1883

Thomas Couture, 1815-1879

Paul Delaroche 1797-1856

Eugene Fromentin,  1820-1876

Jean Leon Gerome,  1824-1904

 Jean-Paul Laurens1838-1921

 Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel,  1839-1929

Luc Olivier Merson,  1846-1920

Hans Makart,  1840 - 1884

Giulio Rosati,  1858-1917

 Franz Xavier  Winterhalter, 1805-1873

William Clarke Wontner, 1857-1930

Fritz  Zuber-Buhler, 1822-1896

 

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