Chantal de Prez
27 August 2024
We are delighted to present Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's Le Cours d’Eau Sous Les Arbres in our September 2024 Five Centuries auction.
A mature work by the famous French artist was originally purchased from Corot's 1875 studio sale before passing into a private Scottish collection in the 1880s. Expert Claire Lebeau-Dieterle, who inspected the work in first hand, dates Le Cours d’Eau Sous Les Arbres to c.1870-75.
Le Cours d’Eau Sous Les Arbres is redolent of the ethereal stylisation of Camille Corot’s mature work. Amidst a birch grove we find a farm hand, perhaps resting while journeying out from the town delineated in terracotta along the horizon. Corot suffused his landscapes with silvery Elysian ambience by painting on a ground of pale grey. He then applied colours from dark to light, first tracing the shadowy trees which so often frame his compositions and coming last to the sky which, brushed in diffused strokes, appears to glint through the tree canopies. Around Le Cours d’Eau Corot has suggested yellow wildflowers using flicks of marigold pigment, almost audacious in their brevity. To the lower left the work bears the ‘Vente Corot’ stamp confirming its provenance from the artist’s studio.
"You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon... Ah, a first ray of sunshine!"
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot - from Friedenthal, Richard Letters of the great artists... 1963
By the 1850s Corot had devised an original landscape genre comprising imagined woodland and riverside idylls populated by peasants, nymphs and bacchantes. These Arcadian visions, which Corot dubbed his "Souvenirs", were often based on oil studies made en plein air. Their technical spontaneity and atmospheric verisimilitude constituted a novel approach to landscape painting which anticipated and influenced the work of the Impressionists.
The Souvenirs’ fantastical nature ostensibly ran counter to the Impressionists’ objective to portray modern life, but Corot’s pastoral visions were a response to the encroaching industrialisation and modernisation of France, and for this reason their poignancy continues to resonate with audiences to this day.
JEAN-BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT (FRENCH 1796-1875)
Signed with the Vente Corot stamp, with Vente Corot seal to central stretcher verso, oil on canvas
61cm x 50cm (24in x 19.75in)
£80,000 - £120,000 + fees
Provenance: Corot Studio sale, Paris, 1875, no.223 to M. Detrimont; Acquired by Edward and Isabella Balfour, Balbirnie, Scotland in Paris in the 1880s; Isabella Balfour until 1938, and thence by family descent.
This work will be offered on 05 September live in Edinburgh and online. Other British & European art highlights in our forthcoming Five Centuries auction include works by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Montague Dawson, Edgar Hunt, Leon Augustin L'Hermitte. Viewing will begin in our Edinburgh HQ on Saturday 31 August.
