Jean Baptiste Camille COROT ✿

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot or simply Camille Corot (July 16, 1796 – February 22, 1875), was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. A pivotal figure in landscape painting, his vast output simultaneously referenced the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipated the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Between 1821 and 1822, Corot studied with Achille Etna Michallon, a landscape painter of Corot's age who was a protégé of the painter Jacques-Louis David and who was already a well-respected teacher. Michallon had a great influence on Corot's career.

Camille Corot spent years in Italy that were decisive for his artistic maturation, from 1825 to '28 and then again in '34 and '43, stays which developed in him his sensitivity to light and the rigor with which he draws the lines of landscapes. 20th century criticism assigns a prominent place to Corot's Italian sketches, to their luminosity, to the harmonies of yellow ocher and pale blue, even if for Corot they are nothing more than the basis for more elaborate compositions that he creates in the laboratory. The painter's decisive intention to transcribe reality as it presents itself to the observer's gaze, without embellishments or literary references, emerges more and more forcefully from his works, through the realistic study of light, the solid plastic construction and the simplicity of the composition.