Camille Corot: To Italy

View of Rome - The Bridge and Castel Sant' Angelo
with the Cuppola of St. Peter's" by Camille Corot

"In 1825 Camille Corot went to Rome, where most of his fellow artists laughed at his work, but where all of them loved the worker, gay in spirit as he was, with a good voice for a song, and a modest, patient ear for the spoken words of others. 

Encouragement first came from Aligny who, surprising him at work on a study of the Colosseum, declared that it had qualities of the first value: exactness, skillful treatment, and an air of style. Corot smiled as at the chaffing of a friend; but the friend was an authority in the artist circle at the Café Grec, and, repeating there what he had said in private - protesting that Corot might some day be the master of them all - the bashful merchant's clerk soon found that his art was respected and his future believed in.

Fifty years later, when Aligny's body was brought from Lyons to be reinterred in Paris, Corot was one of the very few who followed it; a 'sacred duty,' as he said, the duty of gratitude to his first champion, bringing him forth in his white hairs under the swirling snow of a bitter winter dawn.

Naples as well as Rome was visited at this time, and perhaps Venice too."

To be continued

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