Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot was one of the greatest formative influences on landscape painting in nineteenth century French art. Corot’s innovative style and practise of painting directly from nature, in the open air, introduced a new and sensitive treatment of light, form, and distance, interpreted in terms of tonal values. It was this spontaneous and sensitive approach to the depiction of light and landscape which was to have a profound effect on the Barbizon School of painters and subsequently upon the Impressionists.

Corot saw etching as a natural extension of pencil drawing and although he first experimented with etching in the mid-1840’s he did not pursue the medium until he was motivated to do so by Félix Bracquemond and subsequently approached by Cadart, upon the formation of the Société des Aquafortistes in 1862.