CAMILLE COROT (1796-1875)
Puy de la Vache (1,167m- 3,829ft)
France (Puy de dôme)
In Monts d'Auvergne, oil on canvas, Musée d'art Roger Quilliot, Clermont-Ferrand
The mountain
The Puy de la Vache (1,167m- 3,829ft) (Puy of the Cow) is a basaltic volcano of the Puys Range, in the Massif Central in France. The Puy de la Vache is located in the town of Saint-Genès-Champanelle, south-west of Clermont-Ferrand. Its principal lava flow, combined with that of the Puy de Lassolas, is called Cheire d'Aydat. It created, by barring valleys, different lakes including Lake Cassière to the North and Lake Aydat to the South in the valley of the Veyre.
With its twin the Puy de Lassolas, they form two monogenic volcanoes, that is to say, born of a single eruptive episode, of strombolian type. They form two cones of slag, the color of which goes from red (for those exposed to the heat of the crater, which has favored their oxidation) to black.
Their joint lava flow (Cheire d'Aydat) traveled fifteen kilometers to the Southeast, reaching the current sites of the towns of Saint-Saturnin and Saint-Amant-Tallende. The slag dropped on the back of the casting made the surface chaotic. It is possible to find on this site rare phenocrysts (large crystals contained in a volcanic rock). Aged 8,600, they are the youngest volcanoes in the Puys range. The last listed eruption was in 6020 before the Christian era.
The painter
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching, is a pivotal figure in landscape painting. His vast output simultaneously refers the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.
Camille Corot, no doubt attracted by the mythical aspect of Monte Soratte, painted it several times during his first stay in Italy between 1825 and 1830. Three of these representations are published in this blog today; although all painted between 1826 and 1827, they are very different from each other, they were painted at different times of the year ant different hours of the day as he used to do. The first presented here, apparently painted during summertime, has an almost Cézanian appearance !
Indeed, with his parents' support, Corot followed the well-established pattern of French painters who went to Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance and to draw the crumbling monuments of Roman antiquity. A condition by his parents before leaving was that he paint a self-portrait for them, his first. During his stay in Italy, Corot completed over 200 drawings and 150 paintings !
Corot learned little from the Renaissance masters (though later he cited Leonardo da Vinci as his favorite painter) and spent most of his time around Rome and in the Italian countryside. The Farnese Gardens with its splendid views of the ancient ruins was a frequent destination, and he painted it at three different times of the day, like Monte Soratte. The training was particularly valuable in gaining an understanding of the challenges of both the mid-range and panoramic perspective, and in effectively placing man-made structures in a natural setting. He also 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.
Of him Claude Monet exclaimed in 1897, "There is only one master here—Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing." His contributions to figure painting are hardly less important; Degas preferred his figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of Picasso pay overt homage to Corot's influence.
Historians 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. In his early period, he painted traditionally and "tight"—with minute exactness, clear outlines, thin brush work, and with absolute definition of objects throughout, with a monochromatic underpainting or ébauche. After he reached his 50th year, his methods changed to focus on breadth of tone and an approach to poetic power conveyed with thicker application of paint; and about 20 years later, from about 1865 onwards, his manner of painting became more lyrical, affected with a more impressionistic touch. In part, this evolution in expression can be seen as marking the transition from the plein-air paintings of his youth, shot through with warm natural light, to the studio-created landscapes of his late maturity, enveloped in uniform tones of silver. In his final 10 years he became the "Père (Father) Corot" of Parisian artistic circles, where he was regarded with personal affection, and acknowledged as one of the five or six greatest landscape painters the world had seen, along with Hobbema, Claude Lorrain, Turner and Constable. In his long and productive life, he painted over 3,000 paintings.
Though often credited as a precursor of Impressionist practice, Corot approached his landscapes more traditionally than is usually believed. Compared to the Impressionists who came later, Corot's palette is restrained, dominated with browns and blacks ("forbidden colors" among the Impressionists) along with dark and silvery green. Though appearing at times to be rapid and spontaneous, usually his strokes were controlled and careful, and his compositions well-thought out and generally rendered as simply and concisely as possible, heightening the poetic effect of the imagery. As he stated, "I noticed that everything that was done correctly on the first attempt was more true, and the forms more beautiful."
Corot's approach to his subjects was similarly traditional. Although he was a major proponent of plein-air studies, he was essentially a studio painter and few of his finished landscapes were completed before the motif. For most of his life, Corot would spend his summers travelling and collecting studies and sketches, and his winters finishing more polished, market-ready works. For example, the title of his Bathers of the Borromean Isles (1865–70) refers to Lake Maggiore in Italy, despite the fact that Corot had not been to Italy in 20 years. His 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.
In the 1860s, Corot became interested in photography, taking photos himself and becoming acquainted with many early photographers, which had the effect of suppressing his painting palette even more in sympathy with the monochromic tones of photographs. This had the result of making his paintings even less dramatic but somewhat more poetic, a result which caused some critics to cite a monotony in his later work. Théophile Thoré wrote that Corot "has only a single octave, extremely limited and in a minor key; a musician would say. He knows scarcely more than a single time of day, the morning, and a single color, pale grey." Corot responded: "What there is to see in painting, or rather what I am looking for, is the form, the whole, the value of the tones...That is why for me the color comes after, because I love more than anything else the overall effect, the harmony of the tones, while color gives you a kind of shock that I don’t like. Perhaps it is the excess of this principal that makes people say I have leaden tones."
In his aversion to shocking color, Corot sharply diverged from the up-and-coming Impressionists, who embraced experimentation with vivid hues.
The works of Corot are housed in museums in France and the Netherlands, Britain, North America and Russia.