home>collection>19th-Century French Painting>Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (French, 1796-1875)
Landscape in a Thunderstorm, c.
1835-1856
Oil on canvas, 38-1/2 x 53-1/4 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

Corot was the first great landscapist of 19th-century France and one of the founders of France's romantic Barbizon school of landscape painters. He exerted a formative influence on both Barbizon colleagues like Henri Harpignies (his Moonrise on the Loire is on view in the same gallery) and the Impressionists who succeeded them. The style of the Chrysler panting-the clarity of its forms and atmosphere-suggests a date of around 1830-35. In all likelihood, Corot painted it as a companion to another of his Italian views from the early 1830s, La Cervara, the Roman Campagna, today in the Cleveland Museum of Art (see illustration on gallery label). Like many French artists before him, Corot sometimes produced companion landscapes as allegorical complements, representing different time of day or weather conditions and, by extension, contrasting natural or emotional states. The sunny Cleveland landscape may symbolize the bright calm of morning, while the cloud-filled Chrysler painting may depict its opposite-a darkening, rain-swept evening scene. Corot showed the Cleveland painting at the 1831 Paris Salon. He waited five more years to unveil the Chrysler painting, exhibiting it at the 1836 Salon.

• european painting & SCULPTURE >

• 19th-Century French Painting >