Unknown_Corot-2012

Corot as Draftsman Amy Kurlander

Over one hundred thirty years after the artist’s death, it is not easy to characterize Corot’s particular achievements in drawing. Exhibitions of Corot’s drawings have been infrequent, especially outside France, and to our knowledge ours is the first to be held in the United States. But the most interesting challenge to seeing Corot’s drawing as an oeuvre is that his objectives and strategies with pencil, pen, chalk and charcoal changed considerably over time. The artist who, in the 1820 s , applied his classical training to define and place the mountains surrounding Civitella (no. 4 ) began in the 1850 s to use his powers of formal synthesis and imagination to create idyllic souvenirs such as Moonlit Landscape (no. 23 ) and Willow Grove (no. 29 ). His understanding of landscape—and the role of drawing in landscape—had become quite different. When Corot first devoted himself to landscape in the early 1820 s, he was aligning himself with an academic tradition which required that he work within a specific genre. The goal of a landscape painter was to produce a large composition, usually with figures, for the annual Salon in Paris. The most highly prized landscape painting was the paysage historique, with its references to Greco-Roman or Biblical narratives. The training undertaken by an aspiring landscape painter such as Corot included direct study of outdoor motifs, both in graphite and oil. Open-air study and sketching was a key part of the process of learning to see and paint, and would serve the artist in the studio as he conceived and executed these formal works to be submitted to the Salon jury. Certainly, the drawings from Corot’s first Rome trip in 1825 – 28 (nos. 3–6 ) belong in this context of classical landscape training, which was further enriched by the artist’s interactions with the international colonies of young landscape painters in Rome. From Achille-Etna Michallon ( 1796–1822 ) and Jean-Victor Bertin ( 1767–1842 ) during his earliest years of study 1822–25 , Corot learned to use hard graphite pencil to capture motifs with precise contours, as well as diagonal hatching to indicate shading. Corot frequently reinforced the graphite drawings of this era in ink and sometimes recopied his initial drawings entirely,