Arts: The Way of the Lark

When at the age of 50 Jean Baptiste Camille Corot won the cross of the Legion of Honor, his father took one look at his elderly son’s shabby attire and said to his wife: “I think we ought to give Camille a little more money.” Corot had never sold a painting in his life, and though he had exhibited at the Salon, it was not until after his death that the range of his work became known. Last week the Art Institute of Chicago had on display the largest Corot exhibition ever shown in the U.S.—223 works.by a man who would have been astonished to learn that 85 years after his death, people were still talking about him.

He was probably the most self-effacing artist who ever lived. He kept his figure paintings turned to the wall and referred to them deprecatingly as “my monkeys.” Of his contemporary, Painter Eugene Delacroix, he would say: “He is an eagle, and I am only a lark.” But for all his modesty, Corot was a single-minded man. He flatly refused to work in his father’s drapery shop, rejected the fiancee his parents selected for him, even refused to marry at all. All that Corot ever really wanted to do was paint.

Though he felt himself surrounded by his superiors, he acknowledged no master. “No one has taught me anything,” he said. The classical influence of Poussin was there, but Corot could not treat a landscape as if it were a stage: he insisted on painting his landscapes on the spot. “One must go to the fields,” he said. “I need real branches.” As he mastered his art, each outdoor scene seemed to declare —in the curves of its shadows and the softness of its light—the very time of day that it was painted. In this, above all his contemporaries, Corot foreshadowed the impressionists.

In both his life and his art he was the epitome of contentment. In failure he did not sulk; in success he was happy to use his wealth to help out his friends, including the caricaturist Daumier, who —impoverished and nearly blind—was about to be evicted from his cottage. Corot bought another cottage for Daumier and sent along a tongue-in-cheek explanation: “It is not for you I do this; it is merely to annoy your landlord.”

While his romantic contemporaries reveled in bright color and dramatic gesture, Corot serenely went his own way, seeing a world of silvery grey and feathery birches. His figures rarely show emotion, but they radiate a sense of brooding mystery (see color). If his landscapes display no flash of power, it is only because he saw the world as perpetually at peace. Corot was the unobtrusive link between French classicism and impressionism—an innovator who would not jolt. “One should,” he insisted, “love the art that procures calm.”