Lot Essay
Between 1860 and 1870, Corot painted a remarkable group of six pictures, all titled L'Atelier, depicting a woman seated in Corot's studio before an easel upon which rests a Corot landscape. Arguably the most complex and thematically rich of Corot's entire oeuvre, this group of pictures strikes a delicate balance between tradition and originality. Corot's multiple, inventive reworkings of the subject suggest that for him the project was an ongoing one, something akin to variations on a theme, rather than a single artistic problem to be solved. The two main phrases which comprise this theme--the figure and the landscape--clearly refer to those two distinct genres within Corot's work. L'Atelier is the site of their interaction, and the ensuing dialogue can potentially reveal a great deal about both.
The decade during which the Atelier group was painted was the zenith of Corot's long and productive career. What had begun as a slow trickle of sales throught the 1850s (after thirty or so years of virtually no sales at all) grew to a steady stream through the 1860s, punctuated by the well-publicized purchases of the Souvenir of Mortefontaine (Musée du Louvre, Paris) by Emperor Napoleon III for the State in 1864, and of Solitude for the Empress Eugenie's personal collection in 1866. At the Exposition Universelle of 1867, Corot received his second medal (the first was awarded in 1855), as well as the distinguished Cross of Officer of the Legion of Honor, one of the highest forms of official recognition for a painter. Young painters (among them Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot) flocked to his studio for guidance. Critical assessment of his work during this decade was generally favorable from a broad spectrum of critics, Corot, paysagiste, was widely held to be the leader of the modern landscape school.
Corot was virtually unknown to his contemporaries as a peintre de figures. Although he had sent a few figural compositions to various Salons, he had also devoted a significant effort throughout his career to painting cabinet-sized figure works. The vast majority of them depict women, dressed in italianate costumes; solitary, they tend to express contemplative or withdrawn states of mind, often reading, holding mandolines, or weaving wreaths of flowers. While the settings are generally landscapes, the figures confound conventional organization in terms of subject matter. At best, they inhabit the gray area at the edges of genre painting. Some of them, such as the Blonde Gasçonne (Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; note her appearance in the backgrounds of figs. 5 and 6) are idealized and stylized virtually to the point of abstraction. Some are essentially portraits, such as the apocryphally titled Femme à la perle (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Still others, like the Young Girl Weaving a Wreath of Flowers (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) or La petite liseuse (Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur) float somewhere in between genres. The iconographic and formal sources for the figure paintings are equally complex; besides working from live models, Corot engaged with Renaissance as well as seventeenth-century Dutch prototypes, contemporary photography, and even his own figure paintings in various works. Corot was enigmatic in his statements about these pictures. Alfred Robaut, Corot's cataloguer and biographer, reports that Corot felt obligated to keep these works in an armoire, because "neither family nor friends would understand them." (A. Robaut, Documents sur Corot, unpublished, vol. II, p. 17) Constant Dutilleux, a student and friend, was evidently the first to happen upon the open armoire while visiting Corot (probably some time around the mid-1850s). At Dutilleux's encouragement, Corot began to show the figures, selectively, to friends; by the mid-1860s, he was selling them, again selectively, to an intimate circuit of Parisian dealers and collectors: Beugniet, Tempelaere, Brame, Cléophas, and Tedesco.
Despite Dutilleux's accidental peek into Corot's armoire and the subsequent slow release of the figure paintings, they were and remained an essentially private part of Corot's work, and as such they did not contribute to his wider public reputation during his lifetime. For reasons which must remain speculative, the 1860s were for him a period of increased attention to the figure. The demand for these works by the dealers named above was certainly significant, if limited. Recurrent episodes of gout kept Corot from his usual travels, gave him more studio time than usual during this decade. It is also possible that he had become sensitive to the accusations of sameness in his "public" work, so the figure might have seemed like relatively unexplored territory. Given his lack of academic training in the figure, he might have felt compelled to develop his facility in this area if he expected to exhibit any publicly, which he eventually did in 1869: he sent the delightful La Liseuse (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) to the Salon of that year--the only figure of this type to be exhibited before his death.
When the figures were finally revealed at the auction of his estate, they were and continue to be understood simply as an extension of his landscape painting--embodiments of "nature" as women. While the conceptual linkage between women and nature was commonplace in nineteenth-century French culture, it is clear that this is only one rather limiting way to understand this aspect of Corot's production. Indeed, "nature" as it appears in Corot's landscapes is a complicated phenomenon, and it seems reasonable that a parallel complexity characterizes the women in Corot's paintings. It is therefore possible to consider Corot's attention to the figure as a response to the shift in the terms of the debate raging around "la peinture moderne" in the 1860s. As noted above, Corot himself had finally benefited from the rise in status of contemporary landscape painting as an expressly modern genre. But this was the period which witnessed the production of such vehemently modern, socially provocative figural paintings as Courbet's Les Demoiselles au bord de la Seine (1856-7, Petit Palais, Paris) and Sleep (1866, Petit Palais, Paris), and Manet's Olympia (1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). As a landscape painter, Corot was excluded from this debate at the Salon. Always an independent, but never a revolutionary, it seems likely that Corot's exploration of and response to a changing artistic climate might manifest themselves in his private work. What better way to articulate them than in his own versions of L'Atelier, perhaps even in a "real allegory" summing up thirty years of his artistic life?
As with virtually all of Corot's work, his figure paintings and the Atelier group in particular pose daunting problems of dating and chronology. Very few of the figure paintings are dated, and only one of the Atelier pictures bears a date: the version in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon (fig. 7) is signed "COROT 1870". With the exception of the version at The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (fig. 5), which was on the wall of Corot's living room at the time of his death, the rest had been sold or given away by 1875. The issue is further complicated by what we know of Corot's working methods: he would put pictures away, only to get them out and repaint them months or even years later. The Lyon and Musée d'Orsay versions (figs. 7 and 8) seem to have been executed in this manner, evident in the layered overpainting of the heads and hands in particular. The present work was dated by Robaut to 1868-70, but Germain Bazin places it anterior to the Lyon version (fig. 7), circa 1865, contemporary with the Orsay version (fig. 8). Both stylistic and thematic evidence support the early date for this painting, but not for the Orsay version.
The overall light tonality and absence of strong contrasts evident in this version, in contrast to figs. 7 and 8, or to other firmly dated works from the period 1868-70 such as La Femme à la Perle or The Letter (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), argue for an earlier date. Here, the figure in particular displays a quality of even lightness, and indeed the action of light and shade is uncomplicated in comparison to the underlying coloristic structure. The darkest passage--the front part of the torso and the sleeve of her left arm--is not articulated as chiaroscuro in the traditional capacity of describing a volume through gradations of tonality. Instead, it plays a remarkable dual role in the formal sense, at once a shadow and a single plane, distinct from the skirt and the right arm. One can even distinguish the fiery red undercoat beneath, which further unifies the pictorial ensemble of the whole torso. The treatment of the figure's flesh, too, is predominantly a coloristic one. Irregular, floating planes of pinkish and slightly yellow flesh-tones hover over a slightly darker undercoat which emerges selectively and subtly as shadow under the chin, or at the nape of the neck below the ear. The skirt (fig. 2) also points to an earlier date stylistically. Perhaps the most dramatic part of the painting, her skirt, is an extraordinary translation of fabric to canvas. It is constructed of innumerable interlocking planes of carefully harmonized pink color-range which both obscure and reveal the dark undercoat beneath. This gives the skirt an underlying framework of volumes entirely its own--wholly independent of the figure's anatomy. Corot then overlaid the surface with loaded, variegated final touches, reinforcing the structure with a remarkably economical surface calligraphy. Some close relatives in Corot's oeuvre would be the drapery of La Petite Liseuse (Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur) of 1855-65. The skirt is not made to take its place quietly and darkly around the legs of the figure, but rather is given a life of its own.
Complementing the painterly skirt is yet another exploration of painted fabric: the landscape on the easel. In this version, the landscape (fig. 3) is quite complete and wholly visible, brushed in with the same range of colors and tonalities which one might expect to find in a "real" Corot landscape. It does not seem to be any specific painting, but bears a certain resemblance in massing and composition to Robaut no. 1204 (present whereabouts unknown), which Robaut dates to 1855-60. The landscape in this version does contain characteristics of Corot's style of the period: an open, horizontal composition, a relatively strong contrast between the sky and the land, and a suggestion of deep space near the center, constructed in terms of overlapping planes. It is not only the most highly finished of the landscapes represented in this group, but also probably the earliest. The landscapes in figures 4, 5, and 6 seem to be from the 1860s, while those in figs. 7 and 8 are clearly much later, of the dark, moody type of the late 1860s and 70s. It is worth noting here, too, that the landscapes in these two versions are framed, in contrast to the others. Bazin has pointed out a likely source for the figure in the very early Femme assise...(Private Collection, Paris) of 1826-28. Although inverted, the pose of the figure in this version retains the essentials of the early study: a vertical, insistently planar arrangement of the head, arm and mandoline. Figures 5 and 6 show further alteration of this same pose by redirecting the figures' gaze toward the landscape, which fractures the plane in favor of a complex spatial envelope. Corot seems to have abandoned this direct self-citation in figs. 7 and 8. The poses in these two versions relate only indirectly to much later figural works.
If Corot were as self-conscious about his figures as Robaut's story would lead us to believe, and if the Atelier group comprised the kind of major project which it seems to, a certain pattern emerges across the entire group which betrays Corot's academic training. Traditional construcion of a tableau in the grand tradition, whether a landscape or a history painting, was a prescribed, multi-stage process. The earliest steps involved the consultation and acknowledgement of historically validated examples, masterpieces of past art. A subsequent step was the integration of the artist's own études d'aprés nature, studies of drapery, or of the live model. The final stage was the adjustment of motifs, expressions, and gestures that would crystallize the various parts into an individualized, unified whole. The process necessitates a gradual obscuring of each source in the service of this final coherent expression. It is therefore fruitful to interpret Corot's use of progressively later and increasingly transformed citations as an index to the chronology of the group and the evolution of its expression. This would mean that this version is the earliest (circa 1860), followed by the Baltimore version (fig. 4), which is most likely a sketch for figs. 5 and 6. These three then date to the period 1865-68. Fig. 8 would then fall with fig. 7, dating to circa 1870. If we accept this chronology, then the group can in fact be understood as a series, a metamorphosis of the figure from a model in the studio seen here to an absorbed viewer of a Corot landscape (figs. 4, 5, and 6), to a figure in a state of reverie (figs. 7 and 8). The figures in the final two versions--one with a book held partially open and the other with a mandoline in a playable position--most nearly approach the self-contained motivation and consonant expression that distinguishes a narrative from a "mere" figure. What Corot narrates is the experience of looking at his landscapes: a reverie, common to all the arts, which endures even after the music stops, the book is closed, and the gaze leaves the painting. This painting can therefore be understood as the first stage of a complex project of self-definition on Corot's part. Of all the versions, it pays the most direct homage to art of the past, most notably seventeenth-century Dutch interiors, as well as those of Chardin. The composition is of an elegant, straightforward simplicity which further distinguishes it from the rest of the group. The back wall is completely bare and strictly parallel to the picture plane, but this is relieved by a subtle series of interlocking rectangles, one of which re-frames the head and torso of the figure. With nothing in the surrounding space or on the wall to distract, attention remains focused on the foreground, a compact triangle of a woman, a mandoline, and a landscape painting. We have all the ingredients for something conventional and emblematic, but not the recipe: her head appears to turn slightly, as she gazes out of the picture at the viewer to declare awareness of herself and her surroundings. Her foot rubs lightly against the leg of the easel, and she touches the painting. The mandoline is pressed silently against her skirt, and the landscape before her is a real, signed Corot. Much more than a muse or an allegory, she is the first of Corot's figures whom he has truly brought to life and invited to leave her misty landscape to join him in the studio so that she, like us, can enjoy the sight of a Corot painting.
The decade during which the Atelier group was painted was the zenith of Corot's long and productive career. What had begun as a slow trickle of sales throught the 1850s (after thirty or so years of virtually no sales at all) grew to a steady stream through the 1860s, punctuated by the well-publicized purchases of the Souvenir of Mortefontaine (Musée du Louvre, Paris) by Emperor Napoleon III for the State in 1864, and of Solitude for the Empress Eugenie's personal collection in 1866. At the Exposition Universelle of 1867, Corot received his second medal (the first was awarded in 1855), as well as the distinguished Cross of Officer of the Legion of Honor, one of the highest forms of official recognition for a painter. Young painters (among them Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot) flocked to his studio for guidance. Critical assessment of his work during this decade was generally favorable from a broad spectrum of critics, Corot, paysagiste, was widely held to be the leader of the modern landscape school.
Corot was virtually unknown to his contemporaries as a peintre de figures. Although he had sent a few figural compositions to various Salons, he had also devoted a significant effort throughout his career to painting cabinet-sized figure works. The vast majority of them depict women, dressed in italianate costumes; solitary, they tend to express contemplative or withdrawn states of mind, often reading, holding mandolines, or weaving wreaths of flowers. While the settings are generally landscapes, the figures confound conventional organization in terms of subject matter. At best, they inhabit the gray area at the edges of genre painting. Some of them, such as the Blonde Gasçonne (Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; note her appearance in the backgrounds of figs. 5 and 6) are idealized and stylized virtually to the point of abstraction. Some are essentially portraits, such as the apocryphally titled Femme à la perle (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Still others, like the Young Girl Weaving a Wreath of Flowers (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) or La petite liseuse (Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur) float somewhere in between genres. The iconographic and formal sources for the figure paintings are equally complex; besides working from live models, Corot engaged with Renaissance as well as seventeenth-century Dutch prototypes, contemporary photography, and even his own figure paintings in various works. Corot was enigmatic in his statements about these pictures. Alfred Robaut, Corot's cataloguer and biographer, reports that Corot felt obligated to keep these works in an armoire, because "neither family nor friends would understand them." (A. Robaut, Documents sur Corot, unpublished, vol. II, p. 17) Constant Dutilleux, a student and friend, was evidently the first to happen upon the open armoire while visiting Corot (probably some time around the mid-1850s). At Dutilleux's encouragement, Corot began to show the figures, selectively, to friends; by the mid-1860s, he was selling them, again selectively, to an intimate circuit of Parisian dealers and collectors: Beugniet, Tempelaere, Brame, Cléophas, and Tedesco.
Despite Dutilleux's accidental peek into Corot's armoire and the subsequent slow release of the figure paintings, they were and remained an essentially private part of Corot's work, and as such they did not contribute to his wider public reputation during his lifetime. For reasons which must remain speculative, the 1860s were for him a period of increased attention to the figure. The demand for these works by the dealers named above was certainly significant, if limited. Recurrent episodes of gout kept Corot from his usual travels, gave him more studio time than usual during this decade. It is also possible that he had become sensitive to the accusations of sameness in his "public" work, so the figure might have seemed like relatively unexplored territory. Given his lack of academic training in the figure, he might have felt compelled to develop his facility in this area if he expected to exhibit any publicly, which he eventually did in 1869: he sent the delightful La Liseuse (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) to the Salon of that year--the only figure of this type to be exhibited before his death.
When the figures were finally revealed at the auction of his estate, they were and continue to be understood simply as an extension of his landscape painting--embodiments of "nature" as women. While the conceptual linkage between women and nature was commonplace in nineteenth-century French culture, it is clear that this is only one rather limiting way to understand this aspect of Corot's production. Indeed, "nature" as it appears in Corot's landscapes is a complicated phenomenon, and it seems reasonable that a parallel complexity characterizes the women in Corot's paintings. It is therefore possible to consider Corot's attention to the figure as a response to the shift in the terms of the debate raging around "la peinture moderne" in the 1860s. As noted above, Corot himself had finally benefited from the rise in status of contemporary landscape painting as an expressly modern genre. But this was the period which witnessed the production of such vehemently modern, socially provocative figural paintings as Courbet's Les Demoiselles au bord de la Seine (1856-7, Petit Palais, Paris) and Sleep (1866, Petit Palais, Paris), and Manet's Olympia (1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). As a landscape painter, Corot was excluded from this debate at the Salon. Always an independent, but never a revolutionary, it seems likely that Corot's exploration of and response to a changing artistic climate might manifest themselves in his private work. What better way to articulate them than in his own versions of L'Atelier, perhaps even in a "real allegory" summing up thirty years of his artistic life?
As with virtually all of Corot's work, his figure paintings and the Atelier group in particular pose daunting problems of dating and chronology. Very few of the figure paintings are dated, and only one of the Atelier pictures bears a date: the version in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon (fig. 7) is signed "COROT 1870". With the exception of the version at The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (fig. 5), which was on the wall of Corot's living room at the time of his death, the rest had been sold or given away by 1875. The issue is further complicated by what we know of Corot's working methods: he would put pictures away, only to get them out and repaint them months or even years later. The Lyon and Musée d'Orsay versions (figs. 7 and 8) seem to have been executed in this manner, evident in the layered overpainting of the heads and hands in particular. The present work was dated by Robaut to 1868-70, but Germain Bazin places it anterior to the Lyon version (fig. 7), circa 1865, contemporary with the Orsay version (fig. 8). Both stylistic and thematic evidence support the early date for this painting, but not for the Orsay version.
The overall light tonality and absence of strong contrasts evident in this version, in contrast to figs. 7 and 8, or to other firmly dated works from the period 1868-70 such as La Femme à la Perle or The Letter (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), argue for an earlier date. Here, the figure in particular displays a quality of even lightness, and indeed the action of light and shade is uncomplicated in comparison to the underlying coloristic structure. The darkest passage--the front part of the torso and the sleeve of her left arm--is not articulated as chiaroscuro in the traditional capacity of describing a volume through gradations of tonality. Instead, it plays a remarkable dual role in the formal sense, at once a shadow and a single plane, distinct from the skirt and the right arm. One can even distinguish the fiery red undercoat beneath, which further unifies the pictorial ensemble of the whole torso. The treatment of the figure's flesh, too, is predominantly a coloristic one. Irregular, floating planes of pinkish and slightly yellow flesh-tones hover over a slightly darker undercoat which emerges selectively and subtly as shadow under the chin, or at the nape of the neck below the ear. The skirt (fig. 2) also points to an earlier date stylistically. Perhaps the most dramatic part of the painting, her skirt, is an extraordinary translation of fabric to canvas. It is constructed of innumerable interlocking planes of carefully harmonized pink color-range which both obscure and reveal the dark undercoat beneath. This gives the skirt an underlying framework of volumes entirely its own--wholly independent of the figure's anatomy. Corot then overlaid the surface with loaded, variegated final touches, reinforcing the structure with a remarkably economical surface calligraphy. Some close relatives in Corot's oeuvre would be the drapery of La Petite Liseuse (Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur) of 1855-65. The skirt is not made to take its place quietly and darkly around the legs of the figure, but rather is given a life of its own.
Complementing the painterly skirt is yet another exploration of painted fabric: the landscape on the easel. In this version, the landscape (fig. 3) is quite complete and wholly visible, brushed in with the same range of colors and tonalities which one might expect to find in a "real" Corot landscape. It does not seem to be any specific painting, but bears a certain resemblance in massing and composition to Robaut no. 1204 (present whereabouts unknown), which Robaut dates to 1855-60. The landscape in this version does contain characteristics of Corot's style of the period: an open, horizontal composition, a relatively strong contrast between the sky and the land, and a suggestion of deep space near the center, constructed in terms of overlapping planes. It is not only the most highly finished of the landscapes represented in this group, but also probably the earliest. The landscapes in figures 4, 5, and 6 seem to be from the 1860s, while those in figs. 7 and 8 are clearly much later, of the dark, moody type of the late 1860s and 70s. It is worth noting here, too, that the landscapes in these two versions are framed, in contrast to the others. Bazin has pointed out a likely source for the figure in the very early Femme assise...(Private Collection, Paris) of 1826-28. Although inverted, the pose of the figure in this version retains the essentials of the early study: a vertical, insistently planar arrangement of the head, arm and mandoline. Figures 5 and 6 show further alteration of this same pose by redirecting the figures' gaze toward the landscape, which fractures the plane in favor of a complex spatial envelope. Corot seems to have abandoned this direct self-citation in figs. 7 and 8. The poses in these two versions relate only indirectly to much later figural works.
If Corot were as self-conscious about his figures as Robaut's story would lead us to believe, and if the Atelier group comprised the kind of major project which it seems to, a certain pattern emerges across the entire group which betrays Corot's academic training. Traditional construcion of a tableau in the grand tradition, whether a landscape or a history painting, was a prescribed, multi-stage process. The earliest steps involved the consultation and acknowledgement of historically validated examples, masterpieces of past art. A subsequent step was the integration of the artist's own études d'aprés nature, studies of drapery, or of the live model. The final stage was the adjustment of motifs, expressions, and gestures that would crystallize the various parts into an individualized, unified whole. The process necessitates a gradual obscuring of each source in the service of this final coherent expression. It is therefore fruitful to interpret Corot's use of progressively later and increasingly transformed citations as an index to the chronology of the group and the evolution of its expression. This would mean that this version is the earliest (circa 1860), followed by the Baltimore version (fig. 4), which is most likely a sketch for figs. 5 and 6. These three then date to the period 1865-68. Fig. 8 would then fall with fig. 7, dating to circa 1870. If we accept this chronology, then the group can in fact be understood as a series, a metamorphosis of the figure from a model in the studio seen here to an absorbed viewer of a Corot landscape (figs. 4, 5, and 6), to a figure in a state of reverie (figs. 7 and 8). The figures in the final two versions--one with a book held partially open and the other with a mandoline in a playable position--most nearly approach the self-contained motivation and consonant expression that distinguishes a narrative from a "mere" figure. What Corot narrates is the experience of looking at his landscapes: a reverie, common to all the arts, which endures even after the music stops, the book is closed, and the gaze leaves the painting. This painting can therefore be understood as the first stage of a complex project of self-definition on Corot's part. Of all the versions, it pays the most direct homage to art of the past, most notably seventeenth-century Dutch interiors, as well as those of Chardin. The composition is of an elegant, straightforward simplicity which further distinguishes it from the rest of the group. The back wall is completely bare and strictly parallel to the picture plane, but this is relieved by a subtle series of interlocking rectangles, one of which re-frames the head and torso of the figure. With nothing in the surrounding space or on the wall to distract, attention remains focused on the foreground, a compact triangle of a woman, a mandoline, and a landscape painting. We have all the ingredients for something conventional and emblematic, but not the recipe: her head appears to turn slightly, as she gazes out of the picture at the viewer to declare awareness of herself and her surroundings. Her foot rubs lightly against the leg of the easel, and she touches the painting. The mandoline is pressed silently against her skirt, and the landscape before her is a real, signed Corot. Much more than a muse or an allegory, she is the first of Corot's figures whom he has truly brought to life and invited to leave her misty landscape to join him in the studio so that she, like us, can enjoy the sight of a Corot painting.