Unknown_Corot-2012

In addition, Corot placed immense importance throughout his career on the establishment of “unity” in landscape. During the first trip to Rome, his progress in painting and drawing had much to do with an increasing ability to create an integrated image through the representation of light and shadow. Capturing relative values of light and dark served not only to distinguish one form from another, or to articulate dimension, but also to unify the image through the patterns and gradations of value across the field (no. 6 ). Corot never forgot this lesson. As the decades progressed, as Corot simplified his compositions by concentrating their elements into a compressed space with a few large masses, he also relied on what he called a “science of values” as a guiding principle. As the artist noted in a sketchbook of around 1860 : Le dessin est la première chose à chercher—ensuite les valeurs—les rapports des formes et des valeurs—voilà les points d’appui—après la couleur, enfin l’exécution. (“Drawing is the first thing to pursue—then values—the relations between forms and values—these are the main points—afterwards color, execution last.”) Musée du Louvre, RF 8709 , fol. 42 verso, cited in Sérullaz 2007 , p. 7 . Before setting down these objectives in words, however, Corot had developed a remarkable symbolic language for recording the relative lights and darks of a given motif (see illustration on previous page; Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 8708 47 , folios 24 v and 25 r) . In a number of sketches from the notebooks of the 1850 s and 1860 s, he would place a circle to mean light, a square to mean dark, and the relative size of circles and squares, if there were more than one, to indicate the relative depth of light and dark. A page from folio I in our sketchbook from the early 1860 s shows Corot deploying this language in a casual notation. Sketches like these tell us that in the later years, Corot’s landscape was not just a gestural performance by the artist, but a particular mode of perception, one that began with the cognition and jotting down of a set of relationships already in nature—the principal lines (“ le dessin ”) and the relative values of a cohering motif. Although it is not until the later years that Corot produced many drawings as independent, signed compositions, either for sale or to offer as gifts, Corot’s figure studies often have a “complete” presence from an early date, as in his study