GALLERY
COMMENTARY

Landscape of La Ferté-Milon

  • Corot,Jean-Baptiste Camille
  • 1855 - 65
  • oil on canvas
  • 23.7 × 39.3 cm

Commentary

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot(1796-1875) was born in Paris. He was raised in a rich family with his father running a cloth wholesale business and his mother a famous ladies' hat shop. His interests were always in painting while he had been educated to succeed to his father's business. When he was 26, in 1822, his parents decided to accept his desire and guarantee him the pension with which he would comfortably live for the rest of his life. This freed him from worries of every day life and helped him to concentrate on painting.
Corot loved nature immensely and frequently drew sketches outdoors. During his three years stay in Italy since 1825, he was very keen on outdoor sketching. Thereby he acquired techniques to capture landscape full of sun light, using bright colors. After this experience, he again traveled to Italy twice more.
Corot gave himself plenty of time to deliberately produce paintings in his studio, based on the sketches he had drawn outdoors. A reason why his paintings look orderly and well balanced is because he restructured the layout of landscape. He has also left remarkable portraits which he drew indoors. "La femme a la perle" (1868-1870, The Louvre Museum) is a good example showing his meticulous observation of the person he was drawing and very accurate depiction of her expressions.
"Landscape of La Ferté-Milon" was drawn in a small village north east to Paris. While it is a small painting, it has captured the spaciousness of the countryside. It was designed in a way that the attention of people seeing this painting would be guided from a hay stack and farming women that are in the left of the painting toward right, to a cow and a farmer, and from a line of trees to the castle. Namely viewers' view is naturally directed from the front toward the back of the painting.

Reference: "Corot" (Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha, Ltd.) 1974

Painting

Apple Picking

Small Table in Evening Dusk

Song of Songs (Le Cantique des Cantiques)

Haystacks

Waterlilies

Cliff of Gréville

Coutyard at the ‘Rondest House’, Pontoise

Woman Wearing a Hat with Silk Gauze

Delightful Land (Te Nave Nave Fenua)

All Things Die, But All Will Be Resurrected through God’s Love

Wave

Carriage and Pair

Three Dancers in Red Costume

Autumn Sea

Old Horse in the Wasteland

Landscape

Festival of Venis

Hair

Winter Orchard

Beethoven

Landscape of La Ferté-Milon

Annunciation