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Later career |
In 1709, Watteau tried to obtain a one-year stay in Rome by winning the Prix de Rome from the Academy, but managed only to get awarded with the second prize. In 1712 he tried again and was persuaded by Charles de La Fosse that he had nothing to learn from going to Rome; thanks to Fosse he was accepted as an associate m... |
Watteau then went to live with the collector Pierre Crozat, who eventually on his death in 1740 left around 400 paintings and 19,000 drawings by the masters. Thus Watteau was able to spend even more time becoming familiar with the works of Rubens and the Venetian masters. |
He lacked aristocratic patrons; his buyers were bourgeois such as bankers and dealers. Among his most famous paintings, beside the two versions of the Pilgrimage to Cythera, one in the Louvre, the other in the Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, are Pierrot (long identified as "Gilles"), Fêtes venitiennes, Love in the Ital... |
Watteau's final masterpiece, the Shop-sign of Gersaint, exits the pastoral forest locale for a mundane urban set of encounters. Painted at Watteau's own insistence, "in eight days, working only in the mornings ... in order to warm up his fingers", this sign for the shop in Paris of the paintings dealer Edme François Ge... |
Watteau alarmed his friends by a carelessness about his future and financial security, as if foreseeing he would not live for long. In fact he had been sickly and physically fragile since childhood. In 1720, he travelled to London, England, to consult Dr. Richard Mead, one of the most fashionable physicians of his time... |
His nephew, Louis Joseph Watteau, son of Antoine's brother Noël Joseph Watteau (1689–1756), and grand nephew, François-Louis-Joseph Watteau, son of Louis, followed Antoine into painting. |
Critical assessment and legacy |
Little known during his lifetime beyond a small circle of his devotees, Watteau "was mentioned but seldom in contemporary art criticism and then usually reprovingly". Sir Michael Levey once noted that Watteau "created, unwittingly, the concept of the individualistic artist loyal to himself, and himself alone". If his i... |
Watteau was a prolific draftsman. His drawings, typically executed in trois crayons technique, were collected and admired even by those, such as count de Caylus or Gersaint, who found fault with his paintings. In 1726 and 1728, Jean de Jullienne published suites of etchings after Watteau's drawings, and in 1735 he publ... |
Watteau's influence on the arts (not only painting, but the decorative arts, costume, film, poetry, music) was more extensive than that of almost any other 18th-century artist. The Watteau dress, a long, sacklike dress with loose pleats hanging from the shoulder at the back, similar to those worn by many of the women i... |
In 1984 Watteau societies were created in Paris, by Jean Ferré, and London, by Dr. Selby Whittingham. A major exhibition in Paris, Washington and Berlin commemorated the 1984 tercentenary of his birth. Since 2000 a Watteau centre has been established at Valenciennes by Professor Chris Rauseo. A catalogue raisonné of Wa... |
Gallery |
Notes |
References |
Bibliography |
External links |
Media related to Antoine Watteau at Wikimedia Commons |
40 artworks by or after Antoine Watteau at the Art UK site |
Alphabetical list of accepted paintings and copies at A Watteau Abecedario |
The Rococo and Watteau |
www.Jean-Antoine-Watteau.org 89 works by Antoine Watteau |
Watteau paintings at the Web Gallery of Art |
Bell, Julian (12 February 2009). "The Pleasure of Watteau". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 3 May 2020. |
Works by Watteau in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum |
The Watteau Abecedario http://watteau-abecedario.org/default.htm |
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (UK: KORR-oh, US: kə-ROH, kor-OH, French: [ʒɑ̃ batist kamij kɔʁo]; 16 July 1796 – 22 February 1875), or simply Camille Corot, was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. A pivotal figure in landscape painting, his vast output simultaneously referenced th... |
Biography |
Early life and training |
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born in Paris on 16 July 1796 in a house at 125 Rue du Bac, now demolished. His family were bourgeois people—his father was a wig maker and his mother, Marie-Françoise Corot, a milliner—and unlike the experience of some of his artistic colleagues, throughout his life he never felt the wa... |
Corot received a scholarship to study at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen, but left after having scholastic difficulties and entered a boarding school. He "was not a brilliant student, and throughout his entire school career he did not get a single nomination for a prize, not even for the drawing classes." Unlike m... |
With his father's help Corot apprenticed to a draper, but he hated commercial life and despised what he called "business tricks", yet he faithfully remained in the trade until he was 26, when his father consented to him adopting the profession of art. Later Corot stated, "I told my father that business and I were simpl... |
During the period when Corot acquired the means to devote himself to art, landscape painting was on the upswing and generally divided into two camps: one―historical landscape by Neoclassicists in Southern Europe representing idealized views of real and fancied sites peopled with ancient, mythological, and biblical figu... |
For a short period between 1821 and 1822, Corot studied with Achille Etna Michallon, a landscape painter of Corot's age who was a protégé of the painter Jacques-Louis David and who was already a well-respected teacher. Michallon had a great influence on Corot's career. Corot's drawing lessons included tracing lithogra... |
Though this school was on the decline, it still held sway in the Salon, the foremost art exhibition in France attended by thousands at each event. Corot later stated, "I made my first landscape from nature...under the eye of this painter, whose only advice was to render with the greatest scrupulousness everything I saw... |
First trip to Italy |
With his parents' support, Corot followed the well-established pattern of French painters who went to Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance and to draw the crumbling monuments of Roman antiquity. A condition by his parents before leaving was that he paint a self-portrait for them, his first. Corot's s... |
It was not only Italian architecture and light which captured Corot's attention. The late-blooming Corot was entranced with Italian females as well: "They still have the most beautiful women in the world that I have met....their eyes, their shoulders, their hands are spectacular. In that, they surpass our women, but on... |
Striving for the Salon |
During the six-year period following his first Italian visit and his second, Corot focused on preparing large landscapes for presentation at the Salon. Several of his salon paintings were adaptations of his Italian oil sketches reworked in the studio by adding imagined, formal elements consistent with Neoclassical prin... |
When out of the studio, Corot traveled throughout France, mirroring his Italian methods, and concentrated on rustic landscapes. He returned to the Normandy coast and to Rouen, the city he lived in as a youth. Corot also did some portraits of friends and relatives, and received his first commissions. His sensitive por... |
In the spring of 1829, Corot came to Barbizon to paint in the Forest of Fontainebleau; he had first painted in the forest at Chailly in 1822. He returned to Barbizon in the autumn of 1830 and in the summer of 1831, where he made drawings and oil studies, from which he made a painting intended for the Salon of 1830; hi... |
Mid-career |
During his two return trips to Italy, he visited Northern Italy, Venice, and again the Roman countryside. In 1835, Corot created a sensation at the Salon with his biblical painting Agar dans le desert (Hagar in the Wilderness), which depicted Hagar, Sarah's handmaiden, and the child Ishmael, dying of thirst in the dese... |
Through the 1840s, Corot continued to have his troubles with the critics (many of his works were flatly rejected for Salon exhibition), nor were many works purchased by the public. While recognition and acceptance by the establishment came slowly, by 1845 Baudelaire led a charge pronouncing Corot the leader in the "mod... |
Having forsaken any long-term relationships with women, Corot remained very close to his parents even in his fifties. A contemporary said of him, "Corot is a man of principle, unconsciously Christian; he surrenders all his freedom to his mother...he has to beg her repeatedly to get permission to go out...for dinner eve... |
By the mid-1850s, Corot's increasingly impressionistic style began to get the recognition that fixed his place in French art. "M. Corot excels...in reproducing vegetation in its fresh beginnings; he marvelously renders the firstlings of the new world." From the 1850s on, Corot painted many landscape souvenirs and paysa... |
Later years |
In the 1860s, Corot was still mixing peasant figures with mythological ones, mixing Neoclassicism with Realism, causing one critic to lament, "If M. Corot would kill, once and for all, the nymphs of his woods and replace them with peasants, I should like him beyond measure." In reality, in later life his human figures ... |
In later life, Corot's studio was filled with students, models, friends, collectors, and dealers who came and went under the tolerant eye of the master, causing him to quip, "Why is it that there are ten of you around me, and not one of you thinks to relight my pipe." Dealers snapped up his works and his prices were of... |
Despite great success and appreciation among artists, collectors, and the more generous critics, his many friends considered, nevertheless, that he was officially neglected, and in 1874, a short time before his death, they presented him with a gold medal. He died in Paris of a stomach disorder aged 78 and was buried at... |
A number of followers called themselves Corot's pupils. The best known are Camille Pissarro, Eugène Boudin, Berthe Morisot, Stanislas Lépine, Antoine Chintreuil, François-Louis Français, Charles Le Roux, and Alexandre Defaux. |
Art and technique |
Corot is a pivotal figure in landscape painting. His work simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. Of him Claude Monet exclaimed in 1897, "There is only one master here—Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing." His contributions to figure p... |
Historians have divided his work into periods, but the points of division are often vague, as he often completed a picture years after he began it. In his early period, he painted traditionally and "tight"—with minute exactness, clear outlines, thin brushwork, and with absolute definition of objects throughout, with a ... |
Though often credited as a precursor of Impressionist practice, Corot approached his landscapes more traditionally than is usually believed. Compared to the Impressionists who came later, Corot's palette is restrained, dominated with browns and blacks ("forbidden colors" among the Impressionists), along with dark and ... |
Corot's approach to his subjects was similarly traditional. Although he was a major proponent of plein-air studies, he was essentially a studio painter and few of his finished landscapes were completed before the motif. For most of his life, Corot would spend his summers travelling and collecting studies and sketches, ... |
In the 1860s, Corot became interested in photography, taking photos himself and becoming acquainted with many early photographers, which had the effect of suppressing his painting palette even more in sympathy with the monochromic tones of photographs. This had the result of making his paintings even less dramatic but... |
In addition to his landscapes (so popular was the late style that there exist numerous forgeries), Corot produced a number of prized figure pictures. While the subjects were sometimes placed in pastoral settings, these were mostly studio pieces, drawn from the live model with both specificity and subtlety. Like his lan... |
Corot summed up his approach to art around 1860: "I interpret with my art as much as with my eye." |
The works of Corot are housed in museums in France and the Netherlands, Britain, North America and Russia. |
Forgeries |
The strong market for Corot's works and his relatively easy-to-imitate late painting style resulted in a huge production of Corot forgeries between 1870 and 1939. René Huyghe famously quipped that "Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America". Although this is a humorous exag... |
In popular culture |
Two of Corot's works are featured and play an important role in the plot of the 2008 French film L'Heure d'été (English title Summer Hour). The film was produced by the Musée d'Orsay, and the two works were lent by the museum for the making of the film. |
There is a street named Rue Corot on Île des Sœurs, Quebec, named for the artist. |
In Arthur Conan Doyle's 1890 novel The Sign of the Four Thaddeus Sholto has an unknown work of Corot on display. |
Selected works |
The Bridge at Narni (1826), Musée du Louvre |
Venise, La Piazetta (1835), Musée du Louvre |
Le Baptême du Christ (1845–1847), Paris, Eglise Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet |
Une Matinée, la Danse des Nymphes (1850), Musée d'Orsay |
Le concert champêtre (1857), Musée Condé, Chantilly |
Macbeth and the Witches (1859), Wallace Collection |
Baigneuses au Bord d'un Lac (1861), private collection |
Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
Gitane au tambourin (1862), Botero Museum, Bogotá |
Meadow by the Swamp, National Museum of Serbia |
Vist of Castel Sant'Angelo, National Museum of Decorative Arts, Buenos Aires |
Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864), Musée du Louvre |
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