Say ‘’Corot’’ and many think of somber oils, featuring trees and skies laced with cumulus clouds, hanging on museum walls. Often forgotten is that open air scenes such as these, painted from the real thing and sometimes incorporating elements of rural life, represented very modern art indeed when they were created during the fifty year period spanning approximately 1825 to 1875.
Just who was Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot? For one, a member of the Barbizon School, so named after a village near Fontainebleau forest (not far from Paris) where he and like-minded artists like Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Théodore Rousseau, went to paint. These artists marked a transition away from Romanticism towards Realism and Impressionism.
While not averse to depicting the occasional romp of mythical beings in a sylvan setting, Corot was more inclined to renditions of real-life ruralscapes, animals and people; vistas of villages or cities as seen from the surrounding countryside; and landscapes incorporating not only trees and clouds but water, hills, and mountains. So were his co-Barbizoners, and hence the term ‘’plein air’’ (open air) that is associated with them.
Camille Corot: Where Switzerland Fits In
That a stupendously scenic, rural nation like Switzerland would appeal to a painter like Corot comes as no surprise, especially as he was a frequent traveller. Travelling—around his home country of France, to the Netherlands, to London—marked his lifestyle, and while he went to Italy three times, Switzerland turned out to be the place he returned to most.
Although he visited the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, canton Ticino; and made forays into the Swiss-German part (e.g. Bern); he came back to two areas in the French-speaking part of Switzerland repeatedly: one was the area around Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) extending from canton Geneva to Lausanne, Vevey and Montreux in canton Vaud, and the other was Gruyère cheese-making country in canton Fribourg.
Corot made a number of friends, not least local artists, in Switzerland but many believe the fact that his mother, Marie-Françoise Oberson, a fashionable Paris hat designer, was of Swiss descent—she was the daughter of a Swiss Guard who hailed from Fribourg—played a significant role in his attachment to the country. Corot, who never married, remained very close to his mother until her death in 1851.
A New Publication Devoted to Corot’s Ties to Switzerland
A recent French-language book called Corot en Suisse, published as catalogue to an art exhibit of the same name that took place through early January 2011 at Geneva’s Musée Rath, traces Corot’s visits to Switzerland, which began in 1825 when he was 29 years old. He passed through on his way to Italy.
He was back in 1828, 1834, 1842, 1843 and 1848, and is thought to have painted the oil (see illustration) of Geneva, from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in 1834. It depicts a view of the city’s Left Bank, with Mount Salève in the background and the three-towered St. Peter’s cathedral on the hill. The scene, painted in the city's Pâquis neighborhood on the opposite shore of Lac Léman, looks remarkably similar to this day.
In 1852, Corot spent the summer in the Geneva wine village of Dardagny, where today a street is named after him. Some readers may be familiar with the scene of a Dardagny village street in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; that painting is not in the new Corot publication, which does however feature a fine view (see illustration below) painted between 1855 and 1857 of the village as seen from surrounding country. That oil is now in an Asian private collection.
Every year between 1852 and 1857 Corot was to spend time in Switzerland, exploring, painting, even exhibiting—he won a gold medal at the Cantonal Exhibition of Fine Arts in Geneva in 1857. Between 1859 and 1863 Corot came to Switzerland several more times; on his last visit, spanning July and August 1863, the now 67-year-old painter once again stayed in Dardagny.
Camille Corot in Swiss Art Collections
If Corot liked Switzerland, the Swiss in turn like him, which is to say his work. All of Switzerland’s major art museums—Zurich, Basel, Bern and notably Geneva’s Museum of Art and History—feature art by Corot, and he is also represented in numerous private collections, including two of the most prestigious, now both open to the public: the Oskar Reinhart collection at 'Am Römerholz' in Winterthur (canton Zurich) and the E. G. Bührle collection in the city of Zurich.
Corot also contributed some panel decorations, started in 1852 and completed in 1859, to the grand salon in the castle perched on the hill above the village of Gruyères (canton Fribourg); two of these are reproduced below. The Château de Gruyères is now a museum, and is eminently worth a visit.
Aside from an opulent photospread of works Corot created in Switzerland, including the Gruyères panels, Corot en Suisse also presents a generous photo selection of Corot works (whether created in Switzerland or not) in Swiss collections.
Corot en Suisse. Texts in French by various authors; 243 color reproductions. Co-edition Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, and Somogy Editions d’Art, Paris, 2010. Book size 24,6 x 28 cm (9.7 x 11 in.); 272 pages; ISBN 978-2-7572-286-9. On sale for CHF 51($53).
The images of the two Corot oils on canvas illustrating this article are used with the permission of the Musée Rath/Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva.
Gail Mangold-Vine - Based in Geneva, Switzerland, Gail Mangold-Vine is the author of two books. Her work as a journalist is published worldwide.
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