Corot: women

Abstract

United here for the first time, the paintings of women by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) constitute a small but stunning and important body of work. Corot: Women offers a new appraisal of these intriguing figures by one of the nineteenth century's great masters of landscape. The women painted by Corot 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 paintings constitute a relatively small and little-known portion of his oeuvre, they were of great importance to the founders of modernist painting, including Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. This publication features more than 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 address Corot's debt to the old masters and the impact of his pictures on both nineteenth- and twentieth-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 Republic--Provided by publisher.

Contents

Corot's women: Painting the female figure / Mary Morton -- Present tense: Corot and painting the body / David Ogawa -- Corot: From model to figure / Sébastien Allard -- Corot's studio revisited: Theme and variations / Heather McPherson.