Constable, with
all his independence, dared not throw over all received canons of art.
And Gericault, while daring to paint a modern theme, daring still more
to embody it in forms plausibly like average humanity, and refusing to
place on a raft in mid-ocean a carefully chosen assortment of antique
statues, still did not think, apparently, that the heavily marked
shadows prevalent throughout his picture were never seen under the
far-reaching arch of the sky, but fell from a studio window. Nor do
the early pictures by Corot free themselves from the influences of the
academy at once. In the studies which he bequeathed to the Louvre--two
tiny canvases on which are depicted the Coliseum and the Castle of St.
Angelo at Rome--the conventional picking out of detail, the painting
of separate objects by themselves, without due relation to each other,
is the effect of early study; and it is only in the as yet timid
reaching for effect of light and atmosphere that we feel the Corot of
the future. These studies were painted in 1826; and as late as 1835
the same influences are manifest in the "Hagar and Ishmael in the
Desert," a historical landscape of the kind dear to the academies,
but saved and made of interest by the native qualities of the painter
struggling to the surface.
Jean Baptiste Camille Corot was born in Paris, July 28, 1796.
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