NARRATOR:
Camille Corot is perhaps best known as a landscape painter. But he painted large figurative pictures too, though he rarely showed them in public.
Mary Morton is Curator and Head of the French Paintings Department at the National Gallery.
MARY MORTON:
There are several hundred of these pictures, often single figural portrayals of women. Here, Corot has hired a model in Paris. She is perhaps Italian, and he’s dressed her in the traditional rural costume of the Roman Campagna and painted the suggestion of a Roman landscape behind her. She is monumental, dignified with solid shoulders. Her facial features and deep-set eyes, that aquiline nose, are modeled all in very small, delicate strokes. But he uses strong darks and lights to evoke an extraordinary sense of volume.
And then there’s this lovely gesture of graceful balance in her left hand, which he rethought several times. At first he had some kind of pot in her hand, and then he finally settles on having her hand rest on a ledge.
NARRATOR:
Corot’s vast output of paintings spanned almost a century, balancing classical traditions in art with formal innovations that greatly influence later artists.
MARY MORTON:
He is a very complex painter, and I think that often we put him in a sort of boring box of landscape paintings because there are so many. These paintings of women are so mysterious and moving, and they certainly had an impact on Cézanne and Picasso, in particular.
