Artist: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (French, 1796-1875)

Title: Ville d'Avray

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Size: 13" x 18" Unframed; 19" x 24" Framed

In this oil on canvas painting, Corot's palette is restrained and dominated by browns and blacks ("forbidden colors" among the Impressionists). Like similar Barbizon scenes, this painting has a moody quality characterized by a contemplative lyricism. A lone boatman with his peasant cottage looms nearby against a backdrop of dwellings on the other bank that peaks our curiosity as to the inhabitants and diversity of lifestyles on each side of the river.

Bio:

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker and is considered a great master of landscape painting in the 19th century. A pivotal figure in landscape painting, his vast output (over 3,000 paintings) simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. In the spring of 1829, Corot came to Barbizon to paint in the Forest of Fountainbleu. He first painted in the forest at Chailly in 1822 where he met the Barbizon school of painters that favor realist styles. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, color, loose brushwork, and softness of form.