1796-1875 was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796, in a house at 125 Rue du Bac, now demolished. His family were bourgeois people his father was a wigmaker and his mother a milliner and unlike the experience of some of his artistic colleagues, throughout his life he never felt the want of money, as his parents made good investments and ran their businesses well. After his parents married, they bought the millinery shop where she had worked and he gave up his career as a wigmaker to run the business side of the shop. The store was a famous destination for fashionable Parisians and earned the family an excellent income. Corot was the middle of three children born to the family, who lived above their shop during those years. Corot received a scholarship to study in Rouen, but left after having scholastic difficulties and entered a boarding school. He was not a brilliant student, and throughout his entire school career he did not get a single nomination for a prize, not even for the drawing classes. Unlike many masters who demonstrated early talent and inclinations toward art, before 1815 Corot showed no such interest. During those years he lived with the Sennegon family, whose patriarch was a friend of Corot's father and who spent much time with young Corot on nature walks. It was in this region that Corot made his first paintings after nature. At nineteen, Corot was a big child, shy and awkward. He blushed when spoken to. Before the beautiful ladies who frequented his mother's salon, he was embarrassed and fled like a wild thing Emotionally, he was an affectionate and well-behaved son, who adored his mother and trembled when his father spoke. When Corot's parents moved into a new residence in 1817, the twenty-one year old Corot moved into the dormer-windowed room on the third floor, which became his first studio as well. With his father's help he apprenticed to a draper, but he hated commercial life and despised what he called "business tricks", yet he faithfully remained in the trade until he was 26, when his father consented to his adopting the profession of art. Later Corot stated, I told my father that business and I were simply incompatible, and that I was getting a divorce. The business experience proved beneficial, however, by helping him develop an aesthetic sense through his exposure to the colors and textures of the fabrics. Perhaps out of boredom, he turned to oil painting around 1821 and began immediately with landscapes  Related Paintings of Jean-Baptiste Corot :. | Children's Games | Chrysanthemum | Hope in a Prison of Despair, | Reading Aloud, oil painting by Charles W. Bartlett, | Portrait of Count of Vaudreuil |
Related Artists:
RUBENS, Pieter Pauwel
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1640
Arthur Hughes
1832-1915 British Arthur Hughes Gallery Hughes was born in London. His best-known paintings are April Love and The Long Engagement, both of which depict troubled couples contemplating the transience of love and beauty. They were inspired by John Everett Millais's earlier "couple" paintings but place far greater emphasis on the pathos of human inability to maintain the freshness of youthful feeling in comparison to the regenerative power of nature. Like Millais, Hughes also painted an Ophelia and illustrated Keats's poem The Eve of St. Agnes. Hughes's version of the latter is in the form of a secular triptych, a technique he repeated for scenes from Shakespeare's As You Like It. His works are noted for their magical, glowing colouring and delicate draughtsmanship. Hughes was in close contact with the writer George MacDonald and illustrated some of his books as well as producing numerous illustrations for Norman MacLeod's monthly magazine, Good Words. Hughes died in Kew Green, London, leaving about 700 known paintings and drawings, along with over 750 book illustrations.
Sir John Lavery,RA
1856-1941 The artist John Lavery was born in Belfast, and studied in Scotland at the Glasgow School of Art from about 1874. He was in London from 1879-81 (he studied at Heatherley's School of Art for six months), and later in Paris, where he was influenced by Bastien-Lepage. He then returned to Glasgow, becoming a leading member of informal group of painters known as the Glasgow School (James Guthrie was another member), with work characterised by lack of a storyline, but great energy. Lavery achieved his pinnacle in the 1880s, with exhibitions in Europe and America, and as a leading portraitist, he was chosen to paint the State visit of Queen Victoria to the International Exhibition in Glasgow, 1888 - there were some 250 portraits in that picture. From 1890 he visited Morocco frequently, and he changed his British base to London in 1896, where he used a studio belonging to Alfred East. He was elected ARA in 1911,