Wanting a child, Abraham had a son with Hagar, only for Sarah to bear him a child of her own, Isaac. Hagar was the servant of Abraham, whose wife Sarah was unable to conceive. In this painting from 1835, Corot depicts a scene from the Old Testament's Book of Genesis. Oil on canvas - National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Painters such as Claude Monet and Corot's pupil Camille Pissarro would never forget the lesson set forth in works such as this: that a painting, however laborious its execution, must always "remain faithful" to the artist's first impression of the subject. It was also highly influential on the later emergence of Impressionism. Exhibited at the Salon of 1827, The Bridge at Narni was one of Corot's early successes, while his technique of painting on location would become a hallmark of his practice. This work is also interesting in teaching us something about Corot's compositional methods: though the painting was completed in the studio, the same scene is the subject of a related oil sketch - now held at the Louvre - which Corot composed en plein air in the Umbrian countryside, spending a great deal of time and energy rendering his subject first-hand. The artfully arranged figures in the foreground, meanwhile, seem more like the inhabitants of some classical arcadia than contemporary Italian citizens. The idealized Mediterranean setting is rendered quasi-mythological by the inclusion of Roman ruins, the eponymous bridge being the Ponte d'Augusto, built under the Emperor Augustus around 27 BC. The work is partly significant in indicating Corot's deep absorption of Neoclassical principles as a student in Paris. The Bridge at Narni is a perfect example of his style during these Italian years: using traditional academic compositional methods, Corot leads the viewer's eye into and around the canvas with his winding river and carefully considered use of light. For the young Corot, fresh from his artistic training, an early trip to Rome and the surrounding areas (1825-28) fulfilled all his expectations of the Mediterranean countryside, and he produced hundreds of paintings and sketches during his time there. This was a technique later made famous by Impressionist painters such as Monet, as well as by Corot's pupils Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot, who often paid homage to Corot's techniques as showing them how to capture their own first reactions to a natural setting.įor any European painter of the early nineteenth century, the Italian landscape held an almost mystical appeal, having been immortalized by Neoclassical painters such as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Corot was an early advocate of painting en plein air, working with his easel on location in order to capture his first emotional response to a particular scene or setting.Following his initial association with the group, Corot began producing increasingly naturalistic landscape paintings, with a strongly emotive draw that predicts many of the subsequent efforts of Millet, Courbet, and others. These artists were attempting to divest the French landscape of its historical and mythological baggage, painting only what was there, in a spirit of rapt attentiveness to nature. Corot was also involved in the development of Realism, making periodic trips from the late 1820s onwards to the Fontainebleau Forest, where he met and befriended the Barbizon School of painters.The resultant dreamlike quality reflected his desire to stay true to his "first impression" of a landscape, an aim carried much further by Claude Monet and others later in the century. They became renowned for their soft color-palettes, often rendered with such a low level of tonal contrast that they approached a monochrome effect. Although he was an academic painter schooled in Neoclassicism, Corot's landscapes were hailed as having predicted the advances of Impressionism.
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