38 Facts About Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching.

Camille Corot is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously referenced the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipated the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Camille Corot's family were bourgeois people—his father was a wig maker and his mother, Marie-Francoise Corot, a milliner—and unlike the experience of some of his artistic colleagues, throughout his life he never felt the want of money, as his parents made good investments and ran their businesses well.

Camille Corot was the second of three children born to the family, who lived above their shop during those years.

Camille Corot received a scholarship to study at the Lycee Pierre-Corneille in Rouen, but left after having scholastic difficulties and entered a boarding school.

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Camille Corot's drawing lessons included tracing lithographs, copying three-dimensional forms, and making landscape sketches and paintings outdoors, especially in the forests of Fontainebleau, the seaports along Normandy, and the villages west of Paris such as Ville-d'Avray .

Camille Corot's notebooks reveal precise renderings of tree trunks, rocks, and plants which show the influence of Northern realism.

Camille Corot's stay in Italy from 1825 to 1828 was a highly formative and productive one, during which he completed over 200 drawings and 150 paintings.

Camille Corot worked and traveled with several young French painters studying abroad who painted together and socialized at night in the cafes, critiquing each other and gossiping.

Camille Corot learned little from the Renaissance masters and spent most of his time around Rome and in the Italian countryside.

Camille Corot learned how to give buildings and rocks the effect of volume and solidity with proper light and shadow, while using a smooth and thin technique.

When out of the studio, Camille Corot traveled throughout France, mirroring his Italian methods, and concentrated on rustic landscapes.

Camille Corot returned to the Normandy coast and to Rouen, the city he lived in as a youth.

Camille Corot did some portraits of friends and relatives, and received his first commissions.

Camille Corot typically painted two copies of each family portrait, one for the subject and one for the family, and often made copies of his landscapes as well.

Camille Corot returned to Barbizon in the autumn of 1830 and in the summer of 1831, where he made drawings and oil studies, from which he made a painting intended for the Salon of 1830; his View of the Forest of Fontainebleau and, for the salon of 1831, another View of the Forest of Fontainebleau.

Camille Corot exhibited one portrait and several landscapes at the Salon in 1831 and 1833.

In 1835, Camille Corot created a sensation at the Salon with his biblical painting Agar dans le desert, which depicted Hagar, Sarah's handmaiden, and the child Ishmael, dying of thirst in the desert until saved by an angel.

Camille Corot is more a harmonist than a colorist, and his compositions, which are always entirely free of pedantry, are seductive just because of their simplicity of color.

Camille Corot's only commissioned work was a religious painting for a baptismal chapel painted in 1847, in the manner of the Renaissance masters.

Camille Corot delves deeply into a subject: ideas come to him and he adds while working; it's the right approach.

Camille Corot is altogether a wonderful man, who mixes jokes in with his very good advice.

Camille Corot's welcome is very open, very free, very amusing: he speaks or listens to you while hopping on one foot or on two; he sings snatches of opera in a very true voice", but he has a "shrewd, biting side carefully hidden behind his good nature.

Camille Corot became an elder of the artists' community and would use his influence to gain commissions for other artists.

Camille Corot financially supported the upkeep of a day center for children on rue Vandrezanne in Paris.

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Camille Corot died in Paris of a stomach disorder aged 78 and was buried at Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Camille Corot'storians have divided his work into periods, but the points of division are often vague, as he often completed a picture years after he began it.

For most of his life, Camille Corot would spend his summers travelling and collecting studies and sketches, and his winters finishing more polished, market-ready works.

Camille Corot's emphasis on drawing images from the imagination and memory rather than direct observation was in line with the tastes of the Salon jurors, of which he was a member.

Camille Corot knows scarcely more than a single time of day, the morning, and a single color, pale grey.

Camille Corot painted about fifty portraits, mostly of family and friends.

Camille Corot painted thirteen reclining nudes, with his Les Repos strikingly similar in pose to Ingres famous Le Grande Odalisque, but Corot's female is instead a rustic bacchante.

In perhaps his last figure painting, Lady in Blue, Camille Corot achieves an effect reminiscent of Degas, soft yet expressive.

Camille Corot experimented with the cliche verre process—a hybrid of photography and engraving.

Works of Camille Corot are housed in museums in France and the Netherlands, Britain, North America and Russia.

Rene Huyghe famously quipped that "Camille Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America".

Camille Corot allowed his students to copy his works and to even borrow the works for later return, he would touch up and sign student and collector copies, and he would loan works to professional copiers and to rental agencies.

Two of Camille Corot's works are featured and play an important role in the plot of the 2008 French film L'Heure d'ete .