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Lot Essay
With a rocky hillside dominating the right side of the composition, the Corot Paysage offered here is possibly the picture which Henry Osborne ('Harry') Havemeyer purchased under the title Roche de Berri on 29 September 1881 from M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York, together with two landscapes by the Barbizon artist Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña, and a figure painting by Jean-Jacques Henner. If the present painting is in fact Roche de Berri, it is notable for having been Mr. Havemeyer's first acquisition of a work by Corot, which he undertook on his own, two years before he married Louisine Waldron Elder. It is one of six Corot landscapes that the Havemeyers would come to own during the course of their collecting history; they eventually concentrated far more heavily on the artist's figure subjects, and assembled a stellar group of some nineteen pictures of the latter kind (see lot 10). A fine landscape was a commendable choice as an American's introduction to this artist's oeuvre, and to the modern French landscape school generally. The work of the new group of Impressionist painters had yet to attract more than a passing notice in America, and a half-dozen years after his death Corot was still widely regarded to have been the most important landscape painter in France during that era, an assessment that surely figured into the considerable price of $2,000 that Harry Havemeyer paid for his new acquisition.
The late landscapes of Corot have been celebrated, in his time and down to our own day, for the artist's rendering of subtle effets, the impression of the scene, often couched in a veiled half-light and the dispersing mists of early morning. Time seems to stand still, in a world newly awakened and about to come to life. Corot in fact preferred to work during the very early morning hours, often waking at 3:00 a.m. in order to arrive on site with his portable easel and paints before first light, to capture the landscape at the break of dawn. In the present scene a bergère comes upon a cow that had wandered off during the night; a smaller creature, probably the animal's calf, is barely discernible in the shadows higher up on the hillside.
'Corot is the patriarch of the French landscape,' wrote Jules Castagnary in his commentary on the Salon of 1873. 'He has been painting for fifty years. If fame came late to him, talent did not. When one thinks that the hand that placed these deft touches carries the weight of seventy-seven years, such fortitude comes as a surprise and a marvel. The illustrious old man is the lone survivor of a vanished past' (quoted in G. Tinterow et al, Corot, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996, p. 350). Fame had indeed finally come to Corot during the mid-1860s, when his annual contributions of landscapes to the Salon met with wide acclaim from both critics and the public alike. He showed seven important paintings at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris, for which he received a medal and the title of Officier de la Légion d'Honneur. The Paris dealer Alphonse Cadart had included ten Corots in a group exhibition of French painting that he organized and sent to America the previous year; this important show introduced the work of Corot to viewers in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
Collectors clamored at Corot's door, and the artist was hard pressed to meet the demand for his landscapes. These paintings represent a deeply felt and aesthetically refined evocation of time and place, and were prized for their sensitivity and poetry. Corot's landscapes were unlike the more bluntly naturalistic and prosaic scenes of the Realist school by Courbet and Daubigny, and more lately their younger followers Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. Théodore de Banville praised Corot in his review of the Salon of 1861: 'This is not a landscape painter, this is the very poet of landscape who breathes the sadness and joys of nature. The bond, the great bond that makes us the brothers of brooks and trees, he sees it; his figures, as poetic as his forests, are not strangers in the woodland that surrounds them. He knows more than anyone, he has discovered all the customs of boughs and leaves; and now that he is sure he will not distort their inner life, he can dispense with all servile imitation' (quoted in ibid., p. 262).
Progressively minded commentators, as well as painters themselves, acknowledged Corot as one of the significant forebears of the very newest trends, which Edmond Duranty discussed in his seminal pamphlet 'The New Painting,' published in 1876, a year after Corot's death. Duranty stated: 'The roots of the new painting lie also in the work of the great Corot, that man who was always searching, and whom Nature seems to have loved because she revealed so many of her secrets to him' (quoted in the full text version, The New Painting, exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, p. 41). Castagnary wrote of Corot's pictures in the 1874 Salon, the last to which the painter contributed during his lifetime: 'A master in his turn, he saw many generations of young men pass through his studio. They came to ask him the secret of his strength. 'Feel deeply,' he told them, 'and communicate your emotion.' How many eyes did he open? How many hands unbind? How many brains set free! And there he is, still standing, still struggling, as young as ever' (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1996, p. 374).
Interest in Corot's paintings had been growing slowly but steadily in America since the Cadart exhibition of 1866 -- four of the five paintings that were shown in Boston were purchased by collectors there. By the early 1870s there were paintings by Corot in Baltimore, Providence, and further west in Cincinnati and Saint Louis. The artist's work could be found in a half-dozen Philadelphia collections, and New Yorkers had come on board as well. At the end of the decade, Marian G. van Rensselaer proclaimed to the readers of The Century Magazine that Corot was 'one of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived' ('Corot,' The Century Magazine, June 1889, p. 256). Even after Americans developed a taste for Impressionism, thanks largely to the Havemeyers' pioneering advocacy of 'the new painting,' enthusiasm among rising and now famous major American collectors for acquiring Corot continued, unabated, into the next century.
We are grateful to Claire Lebeau for confirming the authenticity of this painting.
The late landscapes of Corot have been celebrated, in his time and down to our own day, for the artist's rendering of subtle effets, the impression of the scene, often couched in a veiled half-light and the dispersing mists of early morning. Time seems to stand still, in a world newly awakened and about to come to life. Corot in fact preferred to work during the very early morning hours, often waking at 3:00 a.m. in order to arrive on site with his portable easel and paints before first light, to capture the landscape at the break of dawn. In the present scene a bergère comes upon a cow that had wandered off during the night; a smaller creature, probably the animal's calf, is barely discernible in the shadows higher up on the hillside.
'Corot is the patriarch of the French landscape,' wrote Jules Castagnary in his commentary on the Salon of 1873. 'He has been painting for fifty years. If fame came late to him, talent did not. When one thinks that the hand that placed these deft touches carries the weight of seventy-seven years, such fortitude comes as a surprise and a marvel. The illustrious old man is the lone survivor of a vanished past' (quoted in G. Tinterow et al, Corot, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996, p. 350). Fame had indeed finally come to Corot during the mid-1860s, when his annual contributions of landscapes to the Salon met with wide acclaim from both critics and the public alike. He showed seven important paintings at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris, for which he received a medal and the title of Officier de la Légion d'Honneur. The Paris dealer Alphonse Cadart had included ten Corots in a group exhibition of French painting that he organized and sent to America the previous year; this important show introduced the work of Corot to viewers in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
Collectors clamored at Corot's door, and the artist was hard pressed to meet the demand for his landscapes. These paintings represent a deeply felt and aesthetically refined evocation of time and place, and were prized for their sensitivity and poetry. Corot's landscapes were unlike the more bluntly naturalistic and prosaic scenes of the Realist school by Courbet and Daubigny, and more lately their younger followers Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. Théodore de Banville praised Corot in his review of the Salon of 1861: 'This is not a landscape painter, this is the very poet of landscape who breathes the sadness and joys of nature. The bond, the great bond that makes us the brothers of brooks and trees, he sees it; his figures, as poetic as his forests, are not strangers in the woodland that surrounds them. He knows more than anyone, he has discovered all the customs of boughs and leaves; and now that he is sure he will not distort their inner life, he can dispense with all servile imitation' (quoted in ibid., p. 262).
Progressively minded commentators, as well as painters themselves, acknowledged Corot as one of the significant forebears of the very newest trends, which Edmond Duranty discussed in his seminal pamphlet 'The New Painting,' published in 1876, a year after Corot's death. Duranty stated: 'The roots of the new painting lie also in the work of the great Corot, that man who was always searching, and whom Nature seems to have loved because she revealed so many of her secrets to him' (quoted in the full text version, The New Painting, exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, p. 41). Castagnary wrote of Corot's pictures in the 1874 Salon, the last to which the painter contributed during his lifetime: 'A master in his turn, he saw many generations of young men pass through his studio. They came to ask him the secret of his strength. 'Feel deeply,' he told them, 'and communicate your emotion.' How many eyes did he open? How many hands unbind? How many brains set free! And there he is, still standing, still struggling, as young as ever' (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1996, p. 374).
Interest in Corot's paintings had been growing slowly but steadily in America since the Cadart exhibition of 1866 -- four of the five paintings that were shown in Boston were purchased by collectors there. By the early 1870s there were paintings by Corot in Baltimore, Providence, and further west in Cincinnati and Saint Louis. The artist's work could be found in a half-dozen Philadelphia collections, and New Yorkers had come on board as well. At the end of the decade, Marian G. van Rensselaer proclaimed to the readers of The Century Magazine that Corot was 'one of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived' ('Corot,' The Century Magazine, June 1889, p. 256). Even after Americans developed a taste for Impressionism, thanks largely to the Havemeyers' pioneering advocacy of 'the new painting,' enthusiasm among rising and now famous major American collectors for acquiring Corot continued, unabated, into the next century.
We are grateful to Claire Lebeau for confirming the authenticity of this painting.