Collection: Art prints by Camille Corot

Camille Corot was a French painter and is considered one of the most influential figures in European landscape painting in the 19th century. He was born in Paris in 1796 to a wealthy merchant family and began his artistic career comparatively late: it was only at the age of twenty-six, after working in the textile trade for several years, that his parents gave him permission to devote himself entirely to painting. However, this unusually late decision in favor of art did not prevent him from creating one of the most extensive and influential works of 19th century French painting.

In his early works, Corot devoted himself above all to the classical landscape tradition and took his inspiration from the great Italianizing landscape painters of the past, in particular Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Three trips to Italy, the first of which in 1825, left deep traces in his work and produced the clear, light-flooded landscape studies that are now among his best-known and most modern achievements. These studies reveal a directness and atmospheric freshness that was far ahead of its time and was only later recognized in its full significance. As he matured, Corot developed an increasingly personal pictorial language that broke away from the classical tradition and followed his own lyrical conception of nature.

A central feature of Corot's mature work became the so-called silver landscape - those dreamlike veiled forest scenes and lakeshores shrouded in a silvery haze, in which delicate birch and poplar trees stand against a soft, diffuse background and nature seems to be in a state between reality and dream. His depictions of the forests of Fontainebleau, the ponds of Normandy and the tranquil river landscapes of Île-de-France are famous. These works demonstrate his masterful ability to emphasize mood and atmosphere over precise documentation of nature and to lend the landscape a poetic, almost musical quality that deeply impressed the public of his time.

In addition to his work as a painter, Corot was an extraordinarily generous and respected figure in French artistic life. He supported younger artists financially and promoted the Barbizon School, whose pursuit of direct observation of nature was close to his own artistic convictions. His influence on the following generation was enormous: the painters of the Barbizon School, the Impressionists and far beyond recognized in him a forerunner and pioneer who had liberated landscape painting from the confines of academic conventions and given it a new, subjective and atmospheric character. Camille Corot died in Paris in 1875. Today, he is considered a key figure in European art history, whose works are represented in the world's most important museums and whose influence on the development of modern landscape painting can hardly be overestimated.