Camille Corot French (1796-1875)

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Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Civita Castellana: A Woodland Stream in a Rocky Gully, 1826 Graphite with some strengthening in pen and black ink on fine-textured, off-white paper 35.6 x 45.2 cm Bequeathed by Dr. Grete Ring, 1954 WA 1954.70.57

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) was one of the most beloved French painters.  He enjoyed great popularity and critical acclaim during his lifetime; and his work has continued to be held in high regard to the present day.  Despite a legacy of over 2,500 pictures of diverse themes (landscapes, portraits, outdoor romantic scenes, religious subjects, architectural subjects, bathing nymphs), in the minds of most of his public he is mainly thought of as a landscape painter.  By all accounts, throughout his life he was a happy and generous man, with many friends and acquaintances, a person who always displayed child-like optimism and an unbounded love for Nature.  Though he learned from classically inclined teachers (Achille-Etna Michallon and Jean-Victor Bertin), he was to a great degree a self-taught artist, and he was never really part of any official trend in art.  He painted what he saw or what he believed he saw as a manifestation of the simplicity and beauty of Nature.  His method was to sketch directly from nature and then finish and refine the image back in his studio.

Corot traveled a lot from one locale to another, and his subjects, by all standards, were very unprepossessing and full of tranquility—a tree, a door, an old building, a bridge, meadows, sky, streams—with little dramatic effect and disquietude or clashes of any kind.  His were calm, serene pictures, displaying harmonious relationships of lines.  Marc Lafargue says of Corot: “Corot was a nature poet, with frank, charming and radiant spirit…His was an instinctive clarity.  He only wishes to express the peculiar sweetness of this serene light, and brings to the expression no theories, no formulae of which he is the slave.”[i]

In 1825, the young Corot visited Italy for the first time.  According to records, he spent little time in galleries and museums and on ingesting the works of Renaissance masters; instead he devoted almost all of his time to sketching outdoors.  He moved from place to place, visiting many out of the way small towns and rural sites outside of Rome and other large cities.  Those visits resulted in the creation of numerous drawings.  Among others he created a series inscribed Civita Castellana, the name referring to a hill town 30 miles north of Rome.  He must have been attracted, not so much to the town itself, but to its surrounding river valleys, gorges, cliffs, and old buildings encapsulated into that mountainous landscape.  He did not paint any of the views while in Italy—which was true of all the sites that he sketched during his Italian tour—but once back in France he made at least one oil of the Civita Castellana's landscape (1828).[ii]

A Woodland Stream in a Rocky Gully, which was executed in 1826, belongs to the Civita Castellana series.  It is a graphite drawing done on pale brown, fine textured paper, with touches of red chalk.  There are some marks of restorations in the upper and lower right corners.  This drawing represents a wooded ravine with large rounded rocks lying at its bottom through which flows a stream.  On the sides of the ravine there are rock formations and a multitude of trees and shrubs.  One of Corot’s primary aims in art was to create the interplay of light and shadow as visible in Nature.  In this image he showed contrasts of light and shadow by covering darker surfaces with a multitude of parallel lines; but those lines—depending on the surface—go in different directions, are of different intensity and have different spacing between them.  Different intensity probably suggests different pressure applied to the pencil.   This drawing suggests that the landscape presented is wild, untamed by the hand of man; rocks/boulders seem to be blocking passageways, overgrown trees extend their branches in all directions, shrubbery grows out of rocks’ crevices.  The foliage, which forms a good portion of the image, is not shown as a multitude of individual leaves, but as large, uneven-edged surfaces, representing clumps of leaves.  These surfaces, like the other elements (rocks, ground, water) are drawn with different intensities, thus creating different impressions of light and shadow.  

There seems to be a feeling of mystery and ambiguity about the whole image.  The eye is drawn to the center of the image as if there were some kind of hidden and unexplored space deep within the dark recesses of the gully.  And on the right, the presence of the large mostly un-shaded cliffs could be interpreted as either positive or negative space. 

Though, as far as one can determine, there is no painting in existence based on this particular drawing, this sketch nevertheless is a fairly typical Corot creation from the likes of which many of his landscape paintings arose.