Camille Corot

The life of Camille Corot,
scene by scene

1. 1822Paris

   Camille was born in Paris in 1796. His parents ran a business selling fabrics and hats, and they wanted their son to follow them into trade. For several years he worked as a clerk for cloth merchants. In 1822, when he was twenty-six, his father finally gave in and agreed to support him. He began studying with the landscape painter Achille-Etna Michallon, and when Michallon died that same year, he went on to Jean-Victor Bertin.

2. 1825Rome

   At twenty-nine, Corot left for Italy and stayed nearly three years. He carried his paints out to the ruins and hills around Rome and made small oil studies on the spot. In the bright sun, the walls of buildings break into large, simple patches of color. Italy stayed with him for life, and he went back twice more.

3. 1835Paris

   Hagar in the Wilderness tells a story from the Hebrew Bible. Hagar and her young son Ishmael have been sent away from home, and in the desert their water has run out. Look near the bottom, just right of center. Hagar kneels with one hand pressed to her forehead and the other lifted toward the sky. Beside her the boy lies limp. Now look up toward the middle of the sky: a small angel with spread wings is flying toward them. Next to the huge boulders and the dry plain, the people are tiny. Corot sent this painting to that year's Salon.

   Painted around this timeHagar in the Wilderness
4. 1836Paris

   At the Salon of those days, a landscape needed a story from the Bible or from myth to be taken seriously as a major painting. Diana and Actaeon is that kind of picture. In the myth, the hunter Actaeon stumbles upon the goddess Diana bathing and is turned into a stag. By the water, a woman stretches out her arm and points toward the woods on the left. Follow her gesture into the distance and you will find Actaeon, small, with antlers already sprouting from his head. Most of the canvas belongs to towering rock and dense trees.

   Painted around this timeDiana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in Her Bath)
5. 1855Paris

   At the Paris World's Fair, Corot won a first-class medal, and Emperor Napoleon III bought one of his landscapes. From around this time, his soft, remembered landscapes, full of silvery mist and trembling leaves, became hugely popular. A painter who had worked for decades without much notice was finally widely loved in his late fifties.

6. 1870Paris

   Corot was famous for landscapes, but in his studio he also painted figures, posing models again and again. He almost never exhibited these pictures and kept them to himself. In Interrupted Reading, painted around 1870, a woman has stopped reading and rests her head on one hand, lost in thought. Look at the lower left: the hand hanging beside her knee still holds the book. The ribbon and red ornaments in her hair and the beaded necklace are painted with care, while the folds of her skirt are laid in with broad, bold strokes. A lover of Italy, Corot often dressed his models in Italian-style costume. In Sibylle, from about the same time, a woman in Italian dress turns toward us holding a single red flower.

   Painted around this timeInterrupted Reading
7. 1874Valmondois

   Once he was comfortable, Corot often helped artists in need. When the caricaturist Honoré Daumier, old and losing his sight, was about to lose the house he lived in at Valmondois, Corot bought it and gave it to him.

8. 1875Paris

   Corot died in Paris in February 1875, at seventy-eight. He never married. Younger painters called him, affectionately, Papa Corot.