PUBLIC FAVORITES (39)

JEAN-BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT was one of the most puzzling painters of the 19th century. His studio pictures could be weak, dull and sickly sweet; his paintings direct from nature were often as pure and clear as a thrush's song. An example of Corot at his best is his Blonde Gasconne (opposite), the public favorite at the Smith College Museum of Art. In this simple picture the pearly atmosphere is conveyed as only Corot could, and the girl seems almost a condensation of the cool sea air. She is an unforgettable presence, melancholy and mysterious as a peasant Mona Lisa. Corot started off strong. He was blessed with deep feeling for nature, instinctive taste and a large allowance from his family. At 29 he went to Italy and immediately started painting the best landscapes of his career. He outdid even his great French predecessors in Rome--Poussin and Claude Lorrain--by redoing their favorite scenes in a less theatrical manner.

But after Corot's return to Paris, lesser men kept urging him to paint big, neo-classical scenes stuffed with the literary allusions then popular. Amiability was perhaps Corot's greatest fault as an artist. In time he gave in, gained critical success with such pictures, then proceeded to make a popular and financial success with watered-down studio versions of his landscapes. From his late 40s until his death at 78, Corot painted thousands of such cobwebby canvases to fill a vast and continuing demand. Only now and then, as with the Blonde Gasconne, did he rise again to the heights of his intransigent youth.

Corot gave a large part of his earnings to other artists. He generally thought his friends better painters than himself.

His own work he described as "little music." The phrase is not simply humble; it has the distinction of accuracy. But when it flowed pure, Corot's "little music" surpassed that of his greatest contemporaries. Neither the lyre of Ingres nor the trumpet of Delacroix is so haunting as Corot's pastoral pipes.

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