Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, the first of the great modern landscapists working in oil , print-making ( etching , Lithography ) , was born in Paris. The son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Corot was a businessman before he became, at the age of twenty-six, an artist. Consequently, he was able to paint without the necessity of selling his work. After a period of study with two academic painters, Corot went to Italy in 1825 where he spent two years roaming the countryside outside Rome as had Claude Lorrain two centuries before. Unlike Claude, however, Corot did not sketch; he painted directly from nature upon small canvases, observing carefully, translating his visual experiences directly and concentrating on architectural clarity and the play of light upon volume. This process led to an entirely new concept of landscape painting. Corot kept his discoveries to himself, however, and sent only Neoclassical landscapes to the Paris Salons.


Corot painted more than three thousand works: small sketches and paintings from nature done in Italy, France, Switzerland, and Holland; large Salon works on historical themes; figure paintings and; and after 1850, landscapes painted from memory in the misty green tonality with which his name is associated. Corot’s influence upon modern art was profound for he was the first to study nature and so was able to give his works that quality of the real that comes from direct and immediate visual experience.


Here we have J. B. C. Corot “Italian Campagna” Etching, Un-signed, printed on laid paper, measuring 4.50 by 7.50 inches and printed in a brownish ink and in good condition.

Art (paintings, prints, frames)