Expert: Jeni Andrews-Fraser - 4/3/2008

Question
Hi Jeni,

I have a oil/canvas copy of Corot's "Ville d' Avray" that was purchased at an antique shop. It is signed "Corot" in the lower left. Any info on when this type of copy was popular or anything help at all would be great!!

Regards,
Scott

Answer
Hello Scott - and thank you for your question.  

Corot's work has always been popular ... a member of the Barbizon School of painting.   The Barbizon School was a group of landscape artists working in the region of the French town of Barbizon. They rejected the Academic tradition, abandoning theory in an attempt to achieve a truer representation of the countryside, and are considered to be part of the French Realist movement. Beginning in the 1820s, Corot spent summers sketching in the vast Forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris. He based this painting on such informal sketches, reworking them to create a more structured composition, with the horizontals of foreground and background balanced by the verticals of trees and the cows positioned to mark recession into space. Nevertheless, as a depiction of a familiar, local site without the “justification” of a biblical or mythological subject, this painting became a key work in the development of French landscape painting when it was accepted for the Salon of 1846. Corot believed that artists “must. . . never lose the first impression that quickened our emotion.” His work formed a bridge between traditional, idealizing landscapes and those of the Impressionists, to whom Corot was a mentor and an inspiration.

Hope this helps
Cheers
Jeni