Art: COROT: THE HAPPY PAINTER

JEAN-BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT rode to fame in 19th century France on his ability to produce a vision of dappled Elysian fields populated by maids dancing under ever blue skies. But 20th century taste has preferred the pyrotechnics of the impressionists to Corot’s blue and silver waltz. Beside figures painted in hot, expressionist colors, Corot’s milk-white shepherds piping to their sheep were considered as unsatisfying as a diet of lily stems.

Last week U.S. gallerygoers had their first chance in a decade to review Corot’s prodigious output, in an exhibit of 32 paintings at Manhattan’s Paul Rosenberg & Co. Their fresh verdict: Corot painted far better than even his contemporaries and immediate successors suspected. He had almost totally suppressed his best work, including early, architecturally conceived landscapes as well as later figure painting, while showing only the vaporous landscapes that the 19th century public crowded to buy.

Painter Corot did not have to sell his work. The bright, sunny sky he kept throughout his career was well justified by his easy life. Supported by an allowance from his parents (a successful Paris modiste and her bookkeeping husband), the simplehearted, cheerful and generous Corot never knew hardship, was free to travel to Rome, voyage about France, take in Switzerland and Holland. His prime subject was landscape, which he recorded in masses of clear-cut light and shadow just as he saw it. The result, well illustrated by his early study of the Norman port of Honfleur (opposite), was a clear handling of geometric masses that came within a brush stroke of anticipating the discoveries made years later by Cézanne.

Corot did not have a single buyer for his work until he was middleaged. But then he was caught up by a wave of buying enthusiasm for the poetic reveries he had begun to paint. He grew increasingly rich in money, but poorer in the quality of his work. During his later years, however, in such paintings as Young Girls of Sparta (opposite) he achieved a new quality in figure painting. By treating his female models as he had his landscapes (“I paint a woman’s breast just as I would an ordinary milk can”), he worked from atmosphere toward firm and solid form, fused his figures with the background. Happy until the end. he expressed just one wish before he died: “To go on painting in heaven.”