Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: Artistic Principles

"L'Allée Verte" by Corot

"No one can doubt Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's accurate vision and patient labor who has seen his earlier pictures. Certain of his noblest qualities appear in them all - his care for harmony in composition and for dignity and grace of line, his belief that the whole is of more importance than any one part, and his desire to speak from a personal point of view. But there is none of the breadth, freedom, synthesis, which characterize his later works. 

Corot's aim was always to simplify expression, to disengage the thing he wished to say - the main idea and meaning, the picture he had in mind - from the thousand minor pictures and ideas that had been wound up with it in Nature. As he lived and labored his power to do this increased. When he retouched an early canvas he never added anything. Improvement always meant suppression - some broadening, simplifying touch. But the fact is a proof of growing knowledge, not of waning interest in truth. What he wanted to repeat were not Nature's statistics, but their sum total. Not her minutiae, but the result she had wrought with them. Not the elements with which she had built up a landscape, but the landscape itself as his eye had embraced and his soul had felt it.

Can anyone know the things to say without knowing the things to omit, build up broad truths in ignorance of the minor truths which compose them, reproduce an impression without remembering what elements had worked together to create it, and which had been of preponderant, controlling value?

No, the real lesson taught by Corot's pictures and Corot's life is that breadth in painting must repose on accurate knowledge; that freedom must have its basis in fidelity to facts, that feeling must be guided by reason and self-restraint."

To be continued

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