Camille Corot : “Ville-d’Avray” (1870)

Late in his career, as Camille Corot turned from plein air painting to studio work, his canvases grew soft and dreamlike. Rendered in muted palettes, they often assumed a silver cast, reminiscent of contemporary photographs, as the artist became immersed in the tonal harmonies that had been his lifelong passion. However, they drew sharp rebuke from critics such as Théophile Thoré, who complained that Corot “has only a single octave, extremely limited and in a minor key…He knows scarcely more than a single time of day, the morning, and a single color, pale grey.”

But others supported Corot. Charles Baudelaire pronounced him the leader of the “modern school of landscape painting,” and answered his critics that “M. Corot is more of a harmonist than a colorist, and his compositions, which are always entirely free of pedantry, are seductive just because of their simplicity of color.” Corot, speaking for himself, responded that “What there is to see in painting, or rather what I am looking for, is the form, the whole, the value of the tones…That is why for me the color comes after, because I love more than anything else the overall effect, the harmony of the tones, while color gives you a kind of shock that I don’t like. Perhaps it is the excess of this principal that makes people say I have leaden tones.”

Corot became a warmly regarded father figure to a generation of the French avant-garde, including Camille Pissarro, Eugène Boudin and Berthe Morisot, and his works remained an important influence upon modern art long after his death. “There is only one master here — Corot,” said Claude Monet in 1897, “We are nothing compared to him, nothing.”