Art: Bonhomme’s Show

As last year’s art season was closing, Knoedler’s swank Manhattan art gallery made art news by giving an important loan exhibition of Goya paintings (TIME, April 23). This week, with a new season just under way, Knoedler’s again made news with another important loan show. On exhibition were 31 canvases by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. Carefully selected, the pictures clearly revealed the charm which has made Corot a necessity in every big museum in the world, has caused him to be included in most Grade A private collections. Surprisingly realistic were his Femme Accoudee (lent by Horace Havermeyer), his peasant woman taking care of her child on the seashore (from the Pennsylvania Museum of Art). Critics were amused by his able portrait of his sister who looked like ZaSu Pitts.

Alfred Robaut, most authoritative compiler of Corot material, records 3,222 Corots. A hoary art joke states that the U. S. today has no less than 30,000. Average value for a good genuine Corot is $20,000. After the painter’s death in 1875, 600 of his paintings were auctioned at the Hotel Drouot in Paris for $400,000. But Corot was 51 before he sold his first painting.

The painter’s mother was a well-to-do dressmaker, a onetime modiste to the court of Napoleon I. His father kept the ac counts. Young Camille Corot was apprenticed to a draper but speedily demonstrated his lack of business sense. His father finally let him go. ahead with his painting, gave him a monthly allowance of 1,500 francs. All his life Camille Corot was comparatively rich.

Corot’s life was a model of peaceful, unexciting bourgeois comfort. When he was an oldster he was kindly, simple, generous to charities and other painters. He once refused 10,000 francs for some pictures, asked the buyer to give Millet’s widow a 10-year 1,000-franc annuity instead. Dealers took advantage of his sliding scale of prices whereby he charged the rich much, the poor little. Paris knew him and loved him as le bonhomme Corot, a brawny celibate who in his youth could and did knock a peasant down with his fist.

Corot had a good voice, would sometimes sing at parties. He never read newspapers. Although he lived through two French revolutions (1830, 1848) and the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) he seemed aware of only the latter.

When he first started painting, the influence of David was still strong. Historical and stilted allegorical subjects were the vogue. The importance and charm of Corot’s best landscapes and figures lie in the fact that, in spite of a dry academic education, he managed to feel and observe nature in his canvases. Like most painters of the period he studied in Rome. He soon discovered the trick of making his daylight luminous by having it trickle through dark foreground trees.

Back in Paris he had little success in the Salon. Once he complained that for 15 years “they put me in the catacombs.” But Theophile Gautier praised his work in verse and prose and Delacroix liked it. In 1846 he painted his Vue de la Foret de Fontainebleau which won him the Cross of the Legion of Honor and caused his father to remark: “I think we must give Camille a little more money.” Two years later he was elected a judge of the Salon; that year the Salon exhibited nine of his paintings. In 1867 he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor. On a rising tide of popularity commissions rained on him and he painted everything from brooches to the inside of a hat. In 1874 Corot hoped to get the Salon’s gold medal. Instead it went to Gerome. Disconsolate, he was cheered when his friends gave him a gold medal of his own. One year later he died, at 79, of cancer of the stomach.