Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796 into a prosperous family that eventually allowed him to pursue painting in his late twenties. He made three formative trips to Italy, where the clarity of Mediterranean light and the grandeur of classical ruins shaped his approach to landscape — an approach that balanced disciplined observation with a lyrical, almost musical sense of atmosphere. He became closely associated with the Barbizon School painters who gathered in the Forest of Fontainebleau, though Corot's work retained a distinctively poetic softness that set it apart.\n\nIn the later decades of his career, Corot developed his celebrated silvery, hazy landscapes — feathery trees reflected in still water, figures dissolving into luminous morning mist — that anticipated the tonalist and early Impressionist sensibilities. He was extraordinarily generous to fellow artists, famously providing financial support to Honoré Daumier and others in need. His influence on the generation that would become the Impressionists was profound, and painters such as Pissarro and Morisot openly acknowledged their debt to his atmospheric handling of light and his liberation of landscape painting from academic constraint.