Camille Corot: Overview

"Little Girl with Doll" by Camille Corot

"In 1827 Camille Corot returned to France and sent his first picture to the Salon exhibition; and thereafter, until his death in 1875, he was never once absent from its walls. In 1834 he went again to Italy, but got no further than Venice, coming promptly home when his father wrote how much he missed him. In 1842 it was Italy again for some five or six months. In 1847 his father died. During all his later years Corot travelled much in Switzerland and various parts of France, and once he went to England and the Netherlands. In 1874 the widowed sister died with whom he had lived for many years, and his own health broke down. And on the 23d of February, 1875, his spirit passed away.

This is not much to tell of a life which lasted seventy-nine years, but it is all there is to be said about Corot's, except as it was bound up with his art. He never married, for, he said, he had a wife already - a little fairy called Imagination, who came at his call and vanished when he did not need her. He lived chiefly at Ville d'Avray with always a pied-à-terre* and studio in Paris, and mixed in no society but that of his brother artists.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Six Portraits: Della Robbia, Correggio, Blake, Corot, George Fuller, Winslow Homer" by Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer.) 

*pied-à-terre: a small apartment, house, or room kept for occasional use