Corot: Women

Exhibition Website

Sep 9 2018 - Dec 31 2018


Dressed in rustic Italian costume or nude on a grassy plain, rendered with a sophisticated use of color and a deft, delicate touch, Corot's women convey a mysterious sense of their inner lives. Corot: Women features 44 paintings created between the 1840s and the early 1870s: nudes, individual figures in costumes, and an allegorical series of the model in the studio. The National Gallery of Art is the only venue for Corot: Women.

"Recognized as a great master of landscape painting, Corot is among the best represented artists in the Gallery's collection of 19th-century French art. This unique exhibition presents an opportunity to examine a smaller and less well-known aspect of his career," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are grateful to The Edwin L. Cox Exhibition Fund, as well as Leonard and Elaine Silverstein, who helped to make this exhibition possible."

One of the greatest landscape painters of the 19th century, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) bridged the French neoclassical tradition and the impressionist movement of the 1870s. His figure paintings constitute a much smaller and less well-known portion of his oeuvre, but are of equal importance to the history of art, in particular for the founders of modernist painting, such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. Corot: Women both distills and expands upon the Musée Marmottan Monet's exhibition Corot: The Painter and His Models (Paris, February 8–July 22, 2018).


Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website
Image: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The Fair Maid of Gascony, c. 1850, oil on canvas, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Purchased with the Drayton Hillyer Fund. Photo by Stephen Petegorsky

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Corot: Women, is a new appraisal of intriguing and meditative figural works by one of the 19th century’s great masters of landscape art. The women painted by Camille Corot (1796–1875) read, dream, and gaze at the viewer, conveying an independent spirit and a sense of their inner lives. Corot’s handling of color and his deft, delicate touch applied to the female form resulted in pictures of quiet majesty. Although these figural paintings constitute a relatively small and little-known portion of his oeuvre, this publication encompasses some forty paintings by Corot—from the single-figure bust and full-length images of the 1840s through the 1860s nudes and his allegorical series devoted to the model in the studio. Essays by leading experts in the field address Corot’s debt to the old masters and the impact of his pictures on both 19th- and 20th-century painting, the relationship of his figural work to his more famous landscape practice, his response to the shifting social position of artists’ models, and the incursion of photography into artistic practice in the Second Empire and early Third.

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  • Painting
  • European
  • 19th Century
  • Portrait
  • Academic
  • Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

Exhibition Venues & Dates