Less of the Landscape

Corot: The Painter and his Models, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, February 8th – July 8th 2018 and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 9th – December 30th, 2018

Few would argue that Jean-Baptist Camille Corot is one of the greatest French painters of the nineteenth century, yet he has in the modern age been overshadowed in the public mind by the impressionists who came after him. His wonderfully felt and observed landscapes of France, Italy and Switzerland are encountered in countless galleries in France and across Europe. Yet a significant part of his legacy, his painting of figures, has been seriously under-exposed. This thrilling exhibition at Musée Marmottan attempts to address this neglect, showing a generous selection of later works focusing on idealised poetically imbued figures, primarily women.

Most people when thinking of Corot conjure a luminous Italian landscape from the 1820s or 30s, or the later Corot of Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864) or Le Batelier de Mortefontaine (1865-70), scenes of a bucolic pastoral France; dream-like and poetic, heady with languor and mystery, the pale lakes of the Valois with their cloud-like tree reflections, extravagantly supine branches and that hallmark arching foliage infused with dappled sunlight. In Corot’s Arcadian glades small groups of figures relax, gambol or reach up in statuesque pose to pluck ripe fruit. Corot’s mastery of light is in evidence throughout his landscapes, many of which seem to be primarily studies in light, or at least the reflection of his inner alchemy working the three interconnecting elements of light, colour and form. Corot’s colours are traditionally more muted and controlled than those of the impressionists, the daring young men of the new schools taking up the reins when Corot’s career was well advanced. Although Corot placed figures in his landscapes these were often included as mere accessories rather than acting as the focal point, but when he showed Paysage avec Figures also known as La Toilette

at the salon in 1859, (a work whose focus was a nude female figure), those like Zola who had mocked his penchant for wood nymphs and idealised peasants, were forced to eat their words. This ground-breaking work whose influence Corot attributed to Rubens, Watteau and Titian, was painted four years before Manet’s seminal Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1863). Yet despite the evident quality of the figure’s modelling the critics of the time still persisted in seeing Corot as a landscape painter. Corot could not even sell this work in 1859 and only did so in 1867, when presumably its merits were better acknowledged in the post-Manet atmosphere of the ‘new painting’. Corot’s nudes thus remained largely ‘unexposed’.

Corot is inseparable from the impressionists, a fact expounded repeatedly by the catalogue and which becomes ever more obvious as you pass through the Marmottan gallery. But this seeping in of impressionism is evident in his landscapes generally from the 1860s onwards, reaching its zenith in late works like Landscape with a White Tower – Souvenir de Crècy from 1874. Here before a fresh blue cloud-scuffed sky, seeming more like choppy water, the white sunlit church tower looms over darker trees and bushes, all of which seem to quiver with movement from the loose quick brushwork associated with impressionism. Only the peasant with her basket is contrastingly still. It is this crucial development, Corot’s unwillingness to be left behind, to be subsumed in the expectations of tradition, which the Marmottan is at pains to disclose through his radical treatment of the figure. Corot was admired by many of the impressionists, held up as a mentor, notably by Corot’s student Berthe Morisot, the largest collection of whose work is held by the Marmottan. But Corot’s paintings of figures were largely hidden from the public, very much a private part of the oeuvre, and Corot was reticent to release them from the studio. He made a clear distinction between works destined for public and private view, and unlike Delacroix this was not driven by commercial interests. Supporters and contemporaries knew about his figure portraits, but to see them they had to breach the hallowed inner sanctum, they rarely appeared on the open market. These works either remained with Corot or were given to friends and a knowing circle of enthusiasts. Art critic and loyal friend to Baudelaire, Charles Asselineau, recalled his visit thus:

The first glance into Monsieur Corot’s studio speaks to you of his whole life and reveals the secret of his talent. One’s gaze wanders over a collection of five hundred painted studies all jostling for space together along the walls, without the merest gap ... spreading over the doors, filling the corners and swelling the portfolios.

In 1860, things began to change, for what Corot had concealed or kept back for years was now suddenly aligned to the coming revolution in novel painterly techniques and the impressionistic preoccupations of modern art. The young men of the 1860s sought out the unlikely human element in Corot’s oeuvre, the unexpected, the personal vision of this traditional master of landscapes, so it was rather his private work, his ‘follies’ that attracted the new generation. Degas was one such admirer and considered Corot’s paintings of figures his supreme achievement. At the dawn of a new century the important German critic and oracle on modern art Julius Meier Graefe published a seminal essay on Corot (1905), which demonstrated his vital influence on impressionism but also the significance of his figures, connecting him in this respect to Rembrandt, Vermeer, Ingres, Raphael and El Greco, but also with contemporaries like Delacroix. Meier Graefe showed that Corot was constricted by his generation, a misunderstood artist pulling ahead, longing to break free but torn by fidelity to tradition. In the end Corot’s imagination could not be contained. He himself put it this way; ‘I was obliged to keep my madness to myself and shut it away in the closet. Then one fine day, I opened the door and the madness escaped!’

Corot straddled two worlds, two generations. Delacroix and Corot were both, in their different ways, necessary bridges to a new age in French art. In Corot’s case this lead to a curious evolution of contrasts which invested his works with creative tension; of boldness and caution, ambition and hesitancy, between the predominance of memory or a focusing on the here and now.

In the 1860s Corot resurrected his early figure studies endowing them with new traits, incorporating themes of classicism with a sense of nostalgia and poetic allurement, the idealisation of the solitary and the muse. But

crucially these figures are transmogrified by memory, ‘souvenir’, a word which consistently precedes landscapes such as Souvenir de Mortefontaine, Souvenir de Castelgandolfo or Souvenir de Coubron. Corot chooses predominantly isolated figures as the main focus, often dressed in the traditional attire of Greek, Italian or Oriental women. Corot famously had a penchant for ‘ liseuses’, young women absorbed in reading, a conceit first perfected by the likes of Vermeer and Fragonard. These introspective poses of book-engrossed females form the backbone to the collection at Musée Marmottan. For Corot the right model was all. He had many to call on, the Italians from rue Mouffetard being particularly sought after, their addresses scribbled in his little notebook. Delacroix also kept a journal packed with addresses of models, but annotations on the flyleaf of the 1859 copy show that it was Corot who often passed them on to him:

Addresses of models given to me by Corot. Madame Hirsch, rue Lacuée, 6. Superb head, brunette, same type as Ristori. Adèle Rosenfels, rue du marché Saint Catherine, 5. Reclining pose seemed to me superb.

And so on. But the most famous and the one who appears here with ever greater frequency is Emma Dobigny, a poor young woman from Montmartre who did the rounds of the studios and was favoured by Degas and Puvis de Chavannes. Corot used her for his irresistible Greek figures, amongst the most sublime here, as well as for his late masterpiece which closes the exhibition, Lady in Blue from 1874. This work from the Louvre is the superlative culmination of Corot’s attempt to keep up with contemporaries and the younger generation, taking for example the boldness of colour from Delacroix and the melancholy gaze of his muses from Fantin-Latour. But there is an assured balance and welling confidence in Lady in Blue, a more ambitious symbiosis of technique and spiritual expression which seems to point to another stage in the painter’s development, unfortunately cut short by his death.

In later years Corot studied the portraits of Degas and Manet obsessively. He was determined not to be left behind. Yet one can’t help thinking he

might have been ahead all along, when one beholds his sybaritic brooding nude Repose or Bacchante with Tambourine, 1860. I for one have rarely witnessed a more spellbinding nude. But crucially Corot managed to synthesise the new into all he had learned from the old masters – the cutting edge of contemporary art grafted onto the secrets of Raphael, Rembrandt, Ingres and Dürer. It is of course the sumptuous blue dress with its rich dark folds which dominates the majestic Lady in Blue, but the handling of light on the model’s face and the right arm which supports her head, is equally vital. We cannot read her shadowed eyes but we can read her gaze; this is a figure poised between states of emotion, caught in an instant of reflection. Thus since the viewer intrudes at a private moment, the painting tantalises, teases, calls us to contemplate the inner configuration of that head turned to the right as if disturbed by our entrance. And what of the small landscape painting before her in whose contemplation she has been interrupted? Is the woman ‘transgressing’ her role as model in the studio by viewing a landscape, or is this a link between the earlier landscape work outdoors and the new imagination aroused by the studio? Or something else?

Three paintings show a young Greek woman (Emma Dobigny) in different poses. In each she wears the signature headscarf with its rustic patchwork of red, white and black squares, the long slender tail running sensuously down her back. In Young Greek Woman at the Fountain 1865-70, a ravishing Dobigny stands before a well, urn ready on the ground. The bend in her leg and slight lift of her shoe shows she is in motion or about to be; is she setting off or coming to a rest? She holds a posy of wildflowers in her languorous hand. The eyes look down, hazily lidded. The light on the face is wonderfully judged, delicately nuanced, allowing the shaded areas around the nose eyes and lips to draw the features downwards, in line with the head, exacerbating a sense of melancholy and reverie, shifting all into the minor key, but so delicately, wistfully. With the soft palette of diffused lilac, blue, grey and brown in the background, the whole effect in 2018 is as enchanting, dream-like and seductive as Corot intended. However, there is no sense as with the later Pre-Raphaelites of any stylistic coarseness, of caricature or sugar-coated idealism. Corot is far subtler, marrying a longhoned painterly technique, his knowledge of old masters, with a poetic

impression wrested from his own inwardness. But the external mystery hovering about these works is their secret ingredient and their message seems all the stronger for eschewing an overbearing narrative. The model is transformed to suit the language of the painting, a method of pictorializing taken up later by chief Corot admirers Cézanne and Matisse.

One of the most striking and unsettling works here must be Young Woman in a Pink Skirt (1845-1850). This is a visibly sensual painting, with the model’s blouse dropped to a daring level, but Corot had not yet begun to produce the sense of a type, as with the ‘ liseuses’ of the 1860s. As in the intense Melancholy (1850-60) also here, the young woman is expressively rendered. She sits calmly, her hands resting on the folds of that lush pink skirt, but turns to faces the viewer questioningly, revealing a haunted countenance afflicted with melancholy or some unnamed grief. Shadow falls across the left side of her face and neck, while behind her an oppressive mass of foliage looms within a brooding twilit landscape, more akin to the mournful Calvaries of Grünewald or the Flemish Primitives. But Corot offsets the bleakness by investing the right hand side of the woman with muted light, so the naked shoulders and chest, the arms, the slightly restless hands in the lap herald a glowing tenderness, sympathy perhaps for an innocence besmirched or even the subtle awareness of gentleness and composure somehow outliving the ravages of loss.

But it is an alluring early portrait, Claire Sennegon, Corot’s Niece, later (1837), that the curators deem ‘the most accomplished expression of the master’s mixture of poetry and restraint in this genre.’ They are not wrong. This supremely elegant work looks forward to the later female figures set in Italian and Greek landscapes, but is more a ‘portrait’, less a reverie. The arc of scrupulously set jet black hair, the equally black lace gloves and those large bewitching dark eyes relieve the immensity of the pearlescent gown billowing out from a narrow waist and the lowering sky behind. The range of shades is complex, but always on the cold side with only that sliver of pinkish orange sunset running the length of the horizon at shoulder height serving to underscore the skin tones.

The exhibition includes a series of beguiling paintings of children from the 1830s, which express that bewitching naivety which Corot’s art is endowed. Unlike Géricault with his forceful depictions of children as wild creatures set apart from the world, Corot painted them as social beings exhibiting the normalness of the everyday in their pose or stance but with a certain troubling opacity in their gaze. These are children very much trapped in a world of adults, their look tells us they are adults in waiting, while they would rather remain children with the purity of their imaginations sacrosanct.

The portraits of male figures included here, perhaps to give a sense of balance, seem somewhat out of tune with the symphony of muses around them. In Portrait of a Man 1835, Ferdinand Osmond, a friend of Corot’s, stands in a jaunty frock coat leaning on his cane. In a pallid anvil-shaped face, dark sorrowful eyes behold the viewer, the mouth half-opening as if to utter the clue which might allow us to read the nature of his suffering. Corot’s faces are spell binding in their ability to subtly transmit human frailty and resilience at once, and we are drawn in as if to a lantern flickering at the end of a dark alley. All else is static, muted black, dark grey or brown, but the sitter’s face is an entity apart, a mosaic of emotion and lived experience. One early work of a male figure is a case in point. Old man seated on a trunk (1826) is a wonderfully touching portrayal of a world-weary elderly man at rest. It’s all in the expression, yet you sense the burden of life on those narrow shoulders, the fatigue that has found a home in his modest frame. Cézanne is not far away.

Among the male figures, it is the extraordinary trio of monk portraits made from life which stand out, drawn from personal memories of Corot’s travels during the 1820s and 1830s. In a highly regarded early study, Italian monk reading from 1826-28, the young brother sits on a stone by the roadside with his staff and sack as if pausing on some pilgrimage to urgently consult his ecclesiastical text. The sense of a living presence resisting time suggested by this self-contained reader-monk is uncanny, we can still feel close to this monk; he is a version of us. But it is the haunting Monk with a Cello (1874) from the end of Corot’s career, a painting that recalls the

finest of Rembrandt, that holds the attention longest and in a sense feels more of a closing work to this exhibition than the Lady in Blue. The old monk approaching death leans into his instrument as if listening for the one note which will peacefully release him from existence. Every element here is beautifully judged, the instrument itself, the drawn face with that long ashen beard following the cello’s dark neck, the imperfect indistinct hand resting so gently on the frets, feeling for the position. And nothing before or beyond the solitary abandoned player, just emptiness, wilderness and a dark shadow looming from the left, death perhaps waiting for the final note to be struck.