A View of Marino
Signature and inscription
stamped ‘VENTE/COROT’ (lower left);
wax seal of the artist’s posthumous sale (reverse, on the stretcher)
Provenance
The artist’s sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 26 May 1875, lot 13 (sold for 1,020 francs to M. Détrimont)
M. Détrimont, Paris, 1875
Mr. Quincy Adams Shaw, Boston, 1942
Neuville, Montpellier, 1958
London, Christie’s, 30 June 1970, lot 22
Mrs. Charlotte Morat, Geneva
Private collection, Canada
Exhibitions
New York, Wildenstein and Co., The Serene World of Corot, 11 November – 12 December 1942
Bibliography
The Serene World of Corot, New York, 1942, exh. cat., no. 6, reproduced (lent by Quincy Adams Shaw; incorrectly listed as Robaut no.158).
Alfred Robaut, L’Oeuvre de Corot, Paris, 1965, vol. II, pp. 56-57, no. 157, reproduced.
Corot’s Italian landscape sketches are regarded as one of the supreme achievements of the plein air landscape tradition, extending from the drawings of Claude Lorrain, through the outdoor sketches of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, to the Impressionists. Corot might be described as a tonalist in color, able to achieve effects of great luminosity through a limited palette dominated by greens and browns. Valenciennes saw plein air sketching as a means of training the eye and the memory, separate from his more finished classical landscapes. Corot, by contrast, used his plein air works to infuse greater freshness and spontaneity into his more formal and finished compositions painted in the studio and intended for the salon.
Corot was born in Paris to fairly prosperous parents which enabled him, without struggle, to fulfill the goal of all French landscape painters: the opportunity to study in Italy, particularly in Rome and the Campagna. He made his first trip to Italy in 1825-28, when the present work was painted. For Corot, as much as for Claude and Poussin in the seventeenth century, Rome and its environs provided a fertile ground for artists to recapture the grandeur of the Roman Empire; the area also gave an artist, especially for a landscape painter, the opportunity to take advantage of the clear Roman light, endlessly picturesque settings and to develop his skills in observing and capturing nature. Indeed, for pensionaries at the French Academy in Rome, transferred by Napoleon to the Villa Medici in 1803, plein air sketching in oil was part of the standard artistic curriculum since the late eighteenth century. Corot’s sketches were as much admired by his contemporaries as now and never more appreciated than by Monet, who remarked in 1897: “there is only one artist here – Corot. We are nothing to him, nothing.”
A View of Marino has been dated by Dieterle to ca. 1827, and the treatment of the trees is close to that in Corot’s View from the Farnese Gardens in the Phillips Collection (inv.0336) and the Coliseum Seen from the Farnese Gardens in the Louvre (inv. R.F.154), both painted in 1826. The combination of trees and rocks also recalls his various views of Civita Castellana from 1827, such as the one in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (inv. 2564; fig.1).
Marino is a small hill top town in the so-called Castelli Romani south of Rome, close to Frascati, Albano, Ariccia and Genzano – sites that had enjoyed a reputation as country retreats since antiquity. The present work is notably intimate and masterly in its depiction of shadows variegated by highlights of foliage picked out in the cool, early morning light. It recalls a famous small painting, Landscape with a Goatherd and Goats by Corot’s great predecessor, Claude Lorrain, now in the National Gallery, London (inv. NG58; fig. 2), of which there is a second version in the Pallavicini Gallery, Rome. In both the landscapes by Claude and Corot, one can admire the way the light, coming from the right, forms a coherent yet complex pattern across the picture surface which perfectly portrays the flickering effects of light as the sun rises in the Campagna. Claude is known to have painted plein air sketches in oil, but no securely identifiable examples have survived. It would be nice to think the two by Claude were painted outdoors, as has occasionally been suggested, but they are probably too detailed to have been executed anywhere but in the studio. It is possible that some of Corot’s sketches were at least partly finished indoors, but this was a common practice even with the Impressionists and in Corot’s case in no way detracts from their freshness and spontaneity.❖