Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

1796 – 1875

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Souvenir of Tuscany c.1845 and 1865

Original etching.

Very good impression, from the edition printed for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in the issue of April 1st, 1875

£320

Paysage d’Italie 1866

Original etching.

Very good impression after the lettering had been removed, with the random vertical line in the sky at the left but without the needle lines going over into the lower margin.

£820

In the Dunes: Souvenir of the Woods at The Hague 1869

Original etching.

Exceptionally rare early proof between Melot’s first and second states of the plate, prior to all lettering.

Superb impression printed on chine volant, with the title space completely unlettered, save for the artist’s etched signature. A particularly fine proof impression printed with considerable plate tone.

Melot notes that only “a few pre-lettering proofs” were printed and that according to Le Garrec (in 1921) only four such impressions were known to exist.

£2,400

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. [more]