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Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
(French, 1796 — 1875)
A Peasant Woman Grazing a Cow at the Edge of a Forest (1865/1870)
Inventory Number: 7166
Oil on canvas.
19 x 14 inches (47.5 x 35 cm)
Corot gave up a commercial career for art, and from the first showed a strong vocation for landscape painting. He lived in Paris, but traveled about France making sketches from nature and from these he composed in his studio. In addition to his journeys in France, he visited England, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Italy. Corot never felt entirely at home with the ideals of the Barbizon School, the members of which saw Romantic realization of the countryside as a form of escapism from urban banality, and he remained more faithful to the French Classical tradition than to the English or Dutch schools.
Corot exhibited regularly at the Salon, but his greatest success there came with a rather different type of picture — more traditionally Romantic in its evocation of an Arcadian past, and painted in a misty soft-edged style that contrasts sharply with the luminous clarity of his more topographical work.
Late in his career Corot also turned to figure painting and it is only fairly recently that this aspect of his work has emerged from neglect — his female nudes are often of high quality. It was, however, his directness of vision that was generally admired by the major landscape painters of the latter half of the century and influenced nearly all of them at some stage in their careers. In his lifetime he was held in great esteem as a man as well as an artist, for he had a noble and generous nature; he supported Millet's widow, for example, and gave a cottage to the blind and impoverished Daumier.
Size can be commissioned smaller or larger.
Collection of the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.