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Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: Dardagny, Morning 1853 © National Gallery, London. |
Inspiration for the Impressionists
COROT TO MONET
The National Gallery
TAKE a right past the Trafalgar Square plinth and, within a minute, enter a different world of serene and beautiful landscapes in the calm of the National.
Claude Monet is quoted: “If I have become a painter I owe it to Eugène Boudin,” about the man who had taught him to paint out of doors. But this is, in a sense, the finishing point of the exhibition, which charts the development of
open-air painting up to the first Impressionist show of 1874.
There is Monet’s own The Thames Below Westminster, Bathers at La Grenouillere and The Beach at Trouville and examples of Boudin’s coast paintings exploring subtleties of light and atmosphere.
A coastal Turner and a Constable – both well known works – are on offer for comparison, but the focus is on the small-scale paintings of the early plein-air artists, particularly Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
The exhibition, which is free, features some 90 works, a number of which are not normally on view and were never intended to be exhibited.
They include beautiful oil sketches, many of them by French artists from “pilgrimages” to Italy, as well as of their native scenery.
Corot to Monet celebrates the “rediscovery” of works often piled up in the corner of artists’ studios and ignored for years.
Attention is especially paid to the Barbizon School,
so-called after the small town in the vast Fontainebleau forest, around and from which Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet and others took inspiration from the woodland, marsh and rock formations.
Their influence on the nascent Impressionists is traced and revealed here. The exhibition is headed up by Sarah Herring, Isaiah Berlin curator of post-1800 paintings at the National and is accompanied by colourful guide to the gallery’s landscape paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries.
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