Corot, the son of a _coiffeur_ and a _modiste_ in comfortable
circumstances, was destined in his youth for the drapery trade, and
was only enabled to follow his bent for the artistic profession when,
at the age of twenty-five, he entered into possession of a small
annual allowance, sufficient to meet his modest requirements and to
save him from the desperate struggle for very existence which was the
fate of some of his later friends and companions. His early work from
nature had already laid the foundations for his subsequent style when
he entered the studio, first of the academic painter Michallon, and
then of Bertin. In 1825 Corot went to Rome, where he painted, among
many pictures of equally rich luscious quality, the _View of the Forum
Romanum_ (No. 139), and the _View of the Coliseum_ (No. 140), which
he himself bequeathed to the State. Although these early works have
none of the elusive charm and lyrical feeling of his mature style,
and are of rather topographic character, they reveal in every touch
the artist enamoured of atmosphere and of the quality of pigment. The
touch is precise, but not tight. The two pictures were painted in 1826,
but already they hold more than a hint of that unrivalled mastery of
tone-values which found supreme expression in _A Street in Douai_ (No.
141F), painted in 1871.
From the precision of his early manner Corot gradually advanced to
freedom and airy looseness of touch; from statement of fact, to the
suggestion of the very spirit and essence of nature in terms of paint
that, more than any other artist’s work, justify the expression
“colour music.” His later canvases are filled with the soft shimmer
of vibrating atmosphere and with the tender poetry of dawn and dusk.
Whilst retaining a truly classic sense of style, and adapting nature
to his purposes by arrangement and generalisation, he never fails to
convince the beholder of the reality of the scene represented. Even
if his glades are peopled with dancing nymphs and satyrs, as in _A
Morning_ (No. 138), these mythical beings no longer suggest classic
statuary, but they belong as much to the landscape as do the trees
and shrubs and clouds, as do the peasant woman and the cow in _The
Dell_ (No. 2801, Plate XLIX.), or the piping shepherd in the exquisite
_Souvenir d’Italie: Castel Gandolfo_ (No. 141B). Of the twenty-two
paintings by the master at the Louvre, no fewer than twelve form
part of the Thomy Thiéry Bequest to which the great French national
collection owes so many of its chief treasures of nineteenth-century
art.