{ "data": { "id": 166672, "accession_number": "2008.386", "share_license_status": "CC0", "tombstone": "Landscape (The Large Tree), c. 1865\u201370. Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796\u20131875). Charcoal with stumping, erasing, and wet brushwork on light brown wove paper; sheet: 24.2 x 41.8 cm (9 1/2 x 16 7/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of Muriel Butkin, 2008.386", "current_location": null, "title": "Landscape (The Large Tree)", "creation_date": "c. 1865\u201370", "creation_date_earliest": 1860, "creation_date_latest": 1875, "artists_tags": [ "male" ], "culture": [ "France, 19th century" ], "technique": "charcoal with stumping, erasing, and wet brushwork on light brown wove paper", "support_materials": [ { "description": "light brown wove paper", "watermarks": [] } ], "department": "Drawings", "collection": "DR - French", "type": "Drawing", "measurements": "Sheet: 24.2 x 41.8 cm (9 1/2 x 16 7/16 in.)", "dimensions": { "sheet": { "height": 0.242, "height_inch": 9, "height_inch_fraction": 0.5, "width": 0.418, "width_inch": 16, "width_inch_fraction": 0.4375 } }, "state_of_the_work": null, "edition_of_the_work": null, "copyright": null, "inscriptions": [ { "inscription": "inscribed, lower left, in charcoal: COROT", "inscription_translation": null, "inscription_remark": null, "sortorder": null } ], "exhibitions": { "current": [ { "id": 187360, "title": "French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin", "description": "French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 26-October 28, 2001); Dahesh Museum of Art (February 19-May 18, 2002).", "opening_date": "2001-08-26T00:00:00" }, { "id": 324628, "title": "Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art", "description": "Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 20-June 11, 2023).", "opening_date": "2023-01-19T05:00:00" } ], "legacy": [ { "description": "French Drawings of the XIX. Century. Obach & Co., London (February\u2013March 1907).", "opening_date": "1907-03-01T00:00:00" }, { "description": "Corot: 1796\u20131875. Art Institute of Chicago (October 6\u2013November 13,1960).", "opening_date": "2013-11-01T00:00:00" }, { "description": "19th- and 20th-Century European Drawings. American Federation of Arts, New York (July 1965\u2013July 1966).", "opening_date": "1965-07-01T00:00:00" }, { "description": "The Forest of Fontainebleau, Refuge of Reality: French Landscape 1800 to 1870. Shepherd Gallery, New York (April 22\u2013June 10, 1972).", "opening_date": "1972-06-10T00:00:00" }, { "description": "French and Other European Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century. Shepherd Gallery, New York (Winter 1979\u201380).", "opening_date": "1979-01-01T00:00:00" } ] }, "provenance": [ { "description": "James Staats Forbes [1823-1904], London", "citations": [], "footnotes": [ "
According to inscriptions on old mount, as recorded by Shepherd Gallery.
" ], "date": "?-1904", "sortorder": 2 }, { "description": "(Obach & Co., London, England)", "citations": [], "footnotes": [ "" ], "date": "1907", "sortorder": 3 }, { "description": "(Allan Frumkin [1927-2002], Chicago, IL)", "citations": [], "footnotes": null, "date": "?-?", "sortorder": 4 }, { "description": "Victor Carlson [1934-2018], Baltimore, MD", "citations": [], "footnotes": null, "date": "by 1965-before 1981", "sortorder": 5 }, { "description": "(Shepherd Gallery, New York, sold to Muriel Butkin, Shaker Heights, OH)", "citations": [], "footnotes": null, "date": "1981", "sortorder": 6 }, { "description": "Muriel Butkin [1916-2008], Shaker Heights, OH, given to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH", "citations": [], "footnotes": null, "date": "1981-2008", "sortorder": 7 }, { "description": "The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH", "citations": [], "footnotes": null, "date": "March 2, 2009", "sortorder": 8 } ], "find_spot": null, "related_works": [], "former_accession_numbers": [], "did_you_know": null, "early_education_description": null, "artlens_description": null, "description": "Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot used sticks of charcoal, a powdery black medium, to dramatic effect in this late-career landscape, layering them and turning them on their side to form tonal areas and fine lines. Describing the period when the drawing was made, a colleague wrote that \u201cone never saw [Corot] without . . . charcoal in his hand.\u201d Such artworks conveyed the poetry the artist saw in nature and advanced his lifelong ambition of elevating landscape from the lowly status it held at the conservative French Academy. Here, he aimed to capture an evocative mood rather than a specific place, describing such works as \u201csouvenirs,\u201d or remembrances.", "external_resources": { "wikidata": [ "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60746112" ], "internet_archive": [ "https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-2008.386-landscape-the-large" ] }, "citations": [ { "citation": "French Drawings of the XIX. Century. Exh. cat. London: Obach & Co, 1907.", "page_number": "Mentioned: no. 53", "url": null }, { "citation": "Corot: 1796-\u20131875, 29. Exh. cat. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1960.", "page_number": "Mentioned: no. 166", "url": null }, { "citation": "Dee, Elaine Evans. 19th- and 20th-Century European Drawings. Exh. cat. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1965.", "page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: pp. 11, 19, no. 12", "url": null }, { "citation": "Ittmann, John W., Robert Kashey, Martin L.H. Reymert, and Victor Carlson. The Forest of Fontainebleau, Refuge of Reality: French Landscape 1800 to 1870. Exh. cat. New York: Shepherd Gallery, 1972.", "page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: cat. no. 17", "url": null }, { "citation": "Mendelowitz, Daniel M., and Duane A. Wakeham. A Guide to Drawing, 5th ed.. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993.", "page_number": "Reproduced: p. 93, fig. 6-16.", "url": null }, { "citation": "Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin, no. 45. Exh. cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.", "page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: pp. 100-101, no. 45", "url": null }, { "citation": "Salsbury, Britany. Nineteenth-Century French Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Lewes, UK, Cleveland, Ohio: GILES; Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.", "page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: p.108-109, no. 14", "url": "" } ], "url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/2008.386", "images": { "annotation": null, "web": { "url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/2008.386/2008.386_web.jpg", "width": "1263", "height": "738", "filesize": "183822", "filename": "2008.386_web.jpg" }, "print": { "url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/2008.386/2008.386_print.jpg", "width": "3400", "height": "1986", "filesize": "1757942", "filename": "2008.386_print.jpg" }, "full": { "url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/2008.386/2008.386_full.tif", "width": "7897", "height": "4613", "filesize": "109309864", "filename": "2008.386_full.tif" } }, "alternate_images": [ { "web": { "url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/2008.386/2008.386_alt0_web.jpg", "width": "1263", "height": "738", "filesize": "757909" }, "print": { "url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/2008.386/2008.386_alt0_print.jpg", "width": "3400", "height": "1988", "filesize": "5709932" }, "full": { "url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/2008.386/2008.386_alt0_full.tif", "width": "5000", "height": "2924", "filesize": "43878372" }, "date_created": "2008-10-28T19:46:29", "annotation": "" } ], "creditline": "Bequest of Muriel Butkin", "image_credit": null, "sketchfab_id": null, "sketchfab_url": null, "gallery_donor_text": null, "athena_id": 166672, "creators": [ { "id": 1588, "description": "Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796\u20131875)", "extent": null, "qualifier": null, "role": "artist", "biography": "Camille Corot's earlier biographers presented him as a naive artist separated from commercial concerns who painted whatever pleased him in the French countryside and from his own emotions. For these writers his importance lay in his loosely painted, atmospheric landscapes, for which later modernists called him the precursor to impressionism. This conception of the artist has undergone significant revision with recent scholarship. Corot never seemed to accept the impressionists' more radical work, especially their enthusiasm for contemporary urban and suburban themes. He represented timeless, rural views disconnected from the industrialization and modernization of nineteenth-century France.\r\nFollowing his father in the clothing trade, Corot worked for eight years before the death of his younger sister in 1821 provided him with the additional income (her annual allowance) to enable him to devote himself to painting. In 1822 he began to study with the landscape painter Achille-Etna Michallon (1796-1822), winner of the first Grand Prix de Rome in historicized landscape, and after Michallon's early death that year, with Bertin (q.v.). Both Michallon and Bertin had trained with Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819), whose later eighteenth-century treatise on landscape painting practice urged artists to study nature closely. In addition, Michallon frequented the village of Barbizon and the forest of Fontainebleau, which would become important subjects for Corot and the group of painters known as the Barbizon school.\r\nIn 1825 Corot made his first trip to Italy, following in the tradition of the French academy but also the independent precedent of the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain. There Corot joined an international circle of artists, including L\u00e9opold Robert (1794-1835) and Aligny (q.v.), who struggled to resolve the contradictory phases of empirical study out of doors and synthetic recreation in the studio. From Rome, he sent his first submissions to the Paris Salon in 1827, among them The View at Narni (National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa). These early Italian views generally feature a bright, warm light with few areas in shadow.\r\nCorot gradually shifted from this early style to one in the 1840s that frequently included larger figures in the middle ground, more complex light effects, and a duller, earthy palette of greens and browns. He continued to use his outdoor works as models for finished canvases but freely adapted the compositions, forms, lighting, and color. The question of finish did not only pertain to the relationship between plein-air studies and studio compositions, which he called paysage compos\u00e9 (invented landscape). Corot sometimes added figures to landscapes that he had painted years earlier and even asked fellow painters such as Diaz de la Pe\u00f1a (q.v.) to paint them. His titles often referred to the geographical location that inspired the image, and some included the word souvenir (broad-ly translated as memory), which suggests recreating or revisiting some experience. \r\nThe critical reception of Corot's work fluctuated. His first Salon submissions passed the jury, but during the 1830s he was first overlooked and then attacked by the critics. By the 1840s his fortunes had improved, and he even sold one Salon picture to the French state. In more radical circles, the critic-poet Charles Baudelaire held Corot up as a leader in contemporary landscape painting. Corot received the Legion of Honor in 1846 as well as a municipal commission to decorate the baptismal fonts in the church of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris. \r\nIn the early 1850s Corot transformed his style again. He developed silvery tones and diffuse lighting effects applied in a few thin layers, over which he added small touches of brighter color for highlights. The soft glimmer and evocative atmosphere of these later works earned him commercial and critical success. During the last decade, Corot turned toward the single figure as subject. The meditative poses and expressions of these figures reminded some contemporary critics of seventeenth-century painting, especially the realism of Spanish and Dutch pictures. But Corot's landscapes remained his most admired work, and during his lifetime imitations or fakes were sold under his name.", "name_in_original_language": null, "birth_year": "1796", "death_year": "1875", "use_in_caption": true, "include_extent": false, "weight": 1 } ], "legal_status": "accessioned", "accession_date": "2009-03-02T00:00:00", "sortable_date": 1860, "date_added_to_oa": null, "date_text": "c. 1865\u201370", "collapse_artists": false, "on_loan": false, "recently_acquired": false, "record_type": "object", "conservation_statement": null, "has_conservation_images": false, "cover_accession_number": null, "is_nazi_era_provenance": false, "impression": null, "alternate_titles": [], "is_highlight": false, "updated_at": "2026-05-29 08:36:39.482000" } }