Corot in Brooklyn

As I painted this scene, I thought of a Corot painting with a peasant walking on a path towards the village with a stream on one side, and maybe a wagon or two.  However, it's a view of Bergen Street approaching Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn.  12x16 inches, oil on panel.  

An Assembly Of Paint

A slight, little painting that I did this afternoon from the corner of a just-mowed hayfield in Williamstown, MA.  I set up in one corner of the rectangular field in the shade looking across the shorter side towards the other corner  where the entrance from the road is located.  I am more convinced about the rightness of what Corot said about plein air painting: it is an expressive assembly ("un assemble") of visual perceptions transformed into paint.  8x10 inches, oil on panel.

Sheep Hill, and Corot Again

This morning I spent a couple hours painting at Sheep Hill with Valeri Larko and her students.  One person said that my painting's parts were moving.  Maybe because everything is topsy-turvy, which is not all my fault since the splendid barns are topsy-turvy.

One more Corot anecdote:  Corot spent six years, from the age of 19 until 25, working in different cloth merchant shops.  His father was trying to get him trained in the family business, but Corot was indifferent to the idea for a long time.  Awareness of cloth and textiles would later show up in the various costumes he acquired for his models to wear.  But, according to the story, he chanced to see a work by the English painter Richard Parkes Bonington in a Paris shop window, and, as a consequence, became determined to pursue a career as a painter.  The story is considered 'apocryphal' but something did happen to Corot at the age of 25.  When he went to Italy a couple years later to paint plein-air, he was older than most of his fellow artists, and his maturity helped him considerably to assume the role of a budding master.

A Walk Down Fifth Avenue and the Death of Corot

A large 26x32 oil on canvas of a view down Fifth Avenue near The Met and Central Park.

Believe it or not, I have another Corot anecdote, from the Michael Clarke book: "Viollet-le-Duc's account of the event [Corot's funeral service] in the Journal des Debats reveals that the service, at which the requiem was sung by the celebrated baritone and collector of Corot's work, Jean-Baptiste Faure, was somewhat spoiled by the excessive complaints of the officiating cleric that the press had not sufficiently reported that Corot, a devout man, had died a Christian.  These rantings were cut short by an unfortunate young madwoman who stood up amongst the packed congregation and let out a series of piercing cries."

Maybe she was his Muse.

Corot Weekend

This painting, a 20x28 oil on canvas, represents the view down Bergen Street as one approaches Washington Avenue after having gone past Grand Avenue in Brooklyn.  One can't miss the triangular shaped building on the corner of Bergen and Washington.

From Corot and The Art of Landscape by Michael Clarke, the best short book on Corot that I've found, comes another Corot anecdote:  "...Corot suffered an official rebuff from the art establishment when in 1865 the final choice for the Grand Medal of Honour at the Salon rested between one of his landscapes and a portrait of Emperor Napoleon III by Alexandre Cabanal (1824-89), an artist whose sanitized nudes, such as the famous Birth of Venus (Musee d'Orsay, Paris) of 1863, represented the height of fashionable taste at the time.  The verdict eventually went in Cabanal's favour after the twenty-sixth walk-through by the jury!"

This past weekend I visited the Corot gallery at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The room contains twenty-two (22) Corot paintings from all periods of his life, and most are masterpieces.  In addition two nearby rooms contained dozens of late 18th and early 19th century plein-air paintings done in Italy by Corot's colleagues, including two more Corots.

The Perils of Painting

The corner of Nelson Street and Hamilton Avenue in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn: a 14x14 oil on panel painting.

Though I recently said I was offering a final Corot anecdote, here's another:  In 1833, Corot painted two views for the owner of a cloth factory in Soissons, one of the factory itself, a major painting now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  For both paintings, Corot received nothing.  One Corot scholar wrote, "Corot was considered an amateur; does one offer money to such people?"

A Tree in Brooklyn and Expectations

A 12x12 oil on canvas of a sycamore tree on Coles Street looking toward Sebring Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In a short, perceptive essay on Corot, S. Lane Faison, Jr. wrote, "He did not not sell a picture until he was fifty-six, a fact which should remind us how little his work conformed to the academic expectations of his day."  This may seem hard to believe today.  But the real lesson about "expectations" affecting and interfering with one's vision is not restricted to the 19th century.

Gowanus Expressway and How to Judge a Book

Facing north this time, we present a 12x12 oil on canvas view of Hamilton Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway.

One final anecdote from the Corot catalog: Corot painted several pictures of women reading.  "According to Theophile Silvestre, a contemporary of Corot, the artist hardly ever read, but he bought books along the quays, 'exclusively for their shapes and colors,' in order to put them into the hands of his models."

A Site Sublime

Another corner off Hamilton Avenue, Hicks Street and Luquer, near the Gowanus Expressway in Red Hook, early in the morning.  This is a 12x12 oil on canvas.

Maybe apropos to this site in Brooklyn, I read in the Corot catalog another story about him: one time he was visiting friends in a small French village.  There he encountered a "... site so sublime that he fell on his knees before it, arms raised to the sky."

Inadequate Allowance

A small 9x12 oil on canvas view from below the Gowanus Expressway on Hamilton Avenue near Bush Street in Brooklyn, New York.

Another story from the Corot catalog that I'm reading:  when in 1846 Corot received the Legion of Honor, "his father wondered whether the allowance given his son --then aged fifty--should be increased."  Two other 19th century artists who depended upon a family allowance to survive: Cezanne and Van Gogh.

Ogunquit and Corot

Another 8x10 pastel seascape.

In his short biography of Corot Jean Leymarie writes about Corot's great oil sketch of the Bridge of Narni, "The turbid river flows between rugged banks, dappled with vivid greens and yellows, then suddenly turns blue in the shadows cast by the arches.  By bringing into the foreground a plane remote from the beholder Corot transposes the factual data of reality into the domain of art in this consummate evocation of the life of Nature, her nearby tumult and her ultimate serenity, and the never ending dialogue of light and shade."  I was struck by the phrase about transposing "factual data of reality in the domain of art..." It sums up the mystery of painting, while still keeping it a mystery.

Heavy Painting and Corot

Of course, I reworked this painting.  Now the gates can close.

If I want to be the Corot of anything, I must work more deliberately.  In the book Corot in Italy by Peter Galassi, the author writes that Corot complained that his teacher Valenciennes painted too quickly.  Corot spent nearly three weeks in March, 1826 painting three views from the Farnese Gardens, one in the morning, one at midday, and one in the late afternoon.  The Barbizon book I cited earlier claimed that Theodore Rousseau was the first to paint the same view over a course of several days, but in fact Corot did it first, and Valenciennes before him.