Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
French, 1796-1875

Pleasures of the Evening, 1875
oil on canvas
44 1/2 × 65 1/4 in.

Michael Armand Hammer and the Armand Hammer Foundation
Loan



Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Self Portrait, c.1840, Galleria Degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy

“In nature, look for form, then the values in relation to tone, color and execution, the whole governed by the emotion you have experienced.” - Jean–Baptiste-Camille Corot

“Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature. I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me.” - Jean–Baptiste-Camille Corot


RESEARCH PAPER

“Pleasures of the Evening” is an oil on canvas painting by French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He painted it in 1875. It was one of his last paintings, created at the end of a career that spanned fifty years and produced over 3000 works of art.

There is a feeling of peace and joy when viewing this painting. The colors and objects are softened, blended, and visually soothing. The figures, illuminated by the final rays of the sun, seem to be celebrating the end of the day with dancing and music. The tall trees and thick foliage create the framework for the scene.

This is a painting of the French countryside at twilight. The setting sun has provided lighting that is central to the beauty of the scene. A variety of colors are produced from the horizontal line of the earth, lighting up the sky, and serving as a background to the painting. There is just a touch of red where the sky and earth meet. This reddish glow becomes a golden color, continuing upwards into the sky, with flashes of pink and orange, and blends of bluish-purple and white. Corot was a great fan of painting dawns and dusks. He felt he could capture the natural colors of these moments by blending the colors, bringing harmony and tranquility to the landscape.

In the foreground, the focal point of the painting, are three dancing nymphs, one with tambourine in hand. On either side, lightly shaded by tree branches, are several nymphs watching the celebration. The blended colors of brown, black, and a touch of red, color the nymphs and their swirling dresses. Corot had a great love of music and dancing. As he moved into a more expressive way of painting, and embraced the natural world, he began to use nymphs in his artwork.

The trees, with their muted, silvery-green leaves and branches, have brought the central part of the painting together as their arched line curves around the dancers, bringing focus and balance to the painting.

Corot had the ability to bring together all the elements of nature in this composition by using his skillful brushstrokes to capture the light and atmosphere of the moment. With his exceptional talent he gives us a serenity to embrace and an invitation to simply enjoy it.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796, during the French Revolution. He was an important landscape painter in France in the late 19th century, and inspired a new generation of French artists. He changed the way these artists looked at painting outside, and influenced how they would approach their artwork in nature.

He was an academic painter schooled in Neoclassicism of the early 19th century. Characteristics of this art movement were clarity of form, muted colors, strong horizontal and vertical lines, simplicity, austere composition, and classical past.

He found great joy in painting outside, and as he began to embrace nature, and create his work in a natural setting, he became more imaginative, moving away from his formal training. His landscapes used Neo-Classical traditions, while beginning the plein-air technique of painting outside.

In painting his landscapes, he felt it was important to reflect on his very first encounter, or impression, with each scene in nature. He also advocated the use of natural light, and was credited with having influenced this use of light in the Impressionist Movement. While he supported the Impressionist Movement, as it embraced a type of art that used small visible brushstrokes and unblended colors, he did not identify with them.

Corot was held in high regard by the young artists who were to become part of that movement. Vincent Van Gogh was a great admirer of his work. A print of “Pleasures of the Evening” hung in Van Gogh’s room in 1875. Later he would create his studies after Corot’s and enjoy the harmony and peace that Corot experienced in his own studies.

Claude Monet would eventually use the plein-air technique by working in an outside location to experience a first reaction of emotion to what he saw and painted. These artists said it was Corot who showed them the joy of capturing the moment when they first came upon a natural setting.

Because “Pleasures of the Evening” was one of his last paintings, the title suggests that he was content and at peace in the final stage of his life. Fittingly, it was selected by Corot’s supporters for the posthumous exhibition organized immediately after his death at seventy-nine in 1875.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Sandy De Rousse, 2024

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ART News, Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille.
http://www.artnews.com.

Media Storehouse, Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille.
http://www.mediastorehouse.com.

Roberts, Keith. “Corot” (London, 1965). p. 37.

COMMENTS

For a long time, Corot was considered only as a painter of landscapes, and particularly of the silvery, vaporous pictures of the pond at Ville d’Avray or of Montefontaine. In recent times, the influence of Italy on Corot’s work has been recognized, and certain artists an students of art have learned to appreciate the beauty of his portraits and nudes, hitherto undeservedly neglected.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Corot was caught up in the vast Romantic movement which, in literature as well as in art, proclaimed the “return to Nature”; in the artistic circles of the time, the influence of Rousseau and of Bernardin de Saint-:Pierre was enormous. Nevertheless, many painters, despite their new interest in the direct study of Nature, did not renounce all the lessons of the past. The feelings they were trying to express were partly paralysed by the classical tradition from which they were as yet unable to escape. Corot—and therein lies his merit—succeeded in giving full expression to his own lyrical aspirations, and to those of his time, while still maintaining the traditional harmony and balance of classicism.

The essential qualities of Corot’s art are conscientiousness and integrity. “Be guided by your feelings alone,” he said. “Have the courage of your convictions. It is better to be nothing than the echo of others.” “When painting from Nature, pay attention first to the form, then to the values or relations of different shades, to the color, and to the technique of execution; but all this must be subordinate to the feeling your have experienced.” Another piece of practical advice: “If your canvas is white, begin with the most striking color, and then proceed in logical order to the lightest. It is very illogical to begin with the sky.” One day, when a visitor criticized one of his models for singing, laughing and being unable to keep still, Corot exclaimed: “But it is that very vivacity that I find charming in her. I aim at representing life—I must have a lively model.”

Corot’s passion for music and dancing is shown by his choice of subjects. He detests historical anecdotes—he prefers a few dancing, singing nymphs. He is a regular opera-, theatre-, and concert-goer; his gods are Haydn, Mozart, Gluck and Beethoven; he has, indeed, much in common with Mozart—emotion, sensitiveness, a classical restraint and sense of the harmony of natural things which would justify the adaptation of Andre Gide’s penetrating definition of the Romantic author, who “always remains on this side of his words,” whereas “the classical author must always be sought on the other side.” Corot in painting, like Stendhal in literature, has no affinity with the troubled and turbulent aspects of Romanticism; he renews and rejuvenates the classical tradition by bringing it into contact with reality.

- Maurice Serullaz, Corot, Bibliotheque Aldine des Arts, v. 19, 1951


Perhaps greater even than Van Gogh's admiration for seventeenth-century examples was his love of landscapes by the painters of the Barbizon School, who had successfully carried on the Dutch tradition. Van Gogh appreciated their honest, personal representation of nature, and he was not alone in his views. Their reputation was widespread, particularly in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and among the artists of the Hague School, who harked back directly to the Barbizon example in their own work.

Van Gogh thought that painters like Camille Corot, Charles-Francois Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Georges Michel, Théodore Rousseau, and Constant Troyon were responsible for “the beginning of the great revolution in art." Their landscapes were not harmonious versions of an idealized countryside; they were individually experienced and faithful versions of a piece of nature they had selected themselves — “a corner of nature seen through a temperament" and “man added to nature,” as, quoting Emile Zola, he described their efforts. The result was “more than nature, more like a revelation.”

To Van Gogh, who in his youth had conceived of nature as a revelation of God, it remained inspired, animated, possessed of a soul. He saw in it a “mysterious endeavor” expressed in a particular mood that could be felt and portrayed by a painter. The Barbizon artists, said Van Gogh, were true masters of this. Personally, he preferred the picturesque and melancholy fall scenes and sunsets. An evening or night scene was imbued with a “dramatic quality . . . a ‘je ne sais quoi’ . . . it expresses that moment and that place in nature where one can go alone, without company.”

Van Gogh was a great admirer of Corot’s work. A print after “Evening” hung in his room in 1875, and later on Van Gogh would make his own studies after Corot. Van Gogh talked about a “Corot mood," informed by “a silence, a mystery, a peace"; Corot captured just this mood in his “Moonlight” of 1855. In 1888 Van Gogh recounted in a letter that the artist supposedly spoke on his deathbed of seeing pink skies in a dream.” Van Gogh believed that Corot’s atmospheric landscape art (and that of Daubigny, Dupré, and Rousseau) was enduring and that Impressionists like Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir, who also painted “completely pink skies,” had continued that tradition.

- Sjraar van Heugten, Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2008, 22-23

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

By the end of his long and distinguished career, “Père Corot” (in English, Father Corot) was hailed as one of the greatest landscape painters of the French school. We know that Van Gogh owned a reproductive print after this very painting (on display nearby), one of the last that we have by Corot’s hand. Fittingly, it was selected by Corot’s supporters for the posthumous exhibition organized immediately after his death. It radiates the timelessness of the kind of ‘souvenirs’ (poetic landscapes with a dreamy indistinctness, as though filtered through the memory of yore) for which the artist had earned early critical accolades. This composition, with its dancing nymphs, framed by silhouetted majestic trees at the close of day, feels like the artist’s personal farewell, as if he were departing for the arcadia of the 17th-century Italian painter Claude Lorrain’s idyllic vision of the classical past.

- Through Vincent's Eyes, 2022


This is one of the last and most accomplished landscapes ever made by Corot. It was selected by his friends and colleagues as one of three canvases to be displayed at the Salon, which took place just after his death on February 22, 1875. As a late work, it testifies to the aging master’s undimmed talents and exemplifies the kind of painting that had made him the most revered landscape artist of his generation. Poetic in its evocation of the classical past, complete with music-making nymphs, the painting exudes a sense of nostalgia as a “souvenir” (as this type of landscape was termed) or remembrance of some distant past. At the same time, the silhouetted trees and amber light reflects the naturalism for which Corot was famed -- the result of the countless oil sketches he did outdoors directly from nature.

- Ridley-Tree Reopening, 2021