BRINGING NATURE HOME

By ROBERT HUGHES

THERE CAN'T BE MANY PEOPLE TOday who would think of putting Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) among the giants of 19th century French painting--Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Monet or Cezanne. Yet in his lifetime he was regarded as one of the greatest landscapists who ever lived, and for most cultivated Frenchmen the very idea of comparing a bungler like Cezanne with their beloved Corot would have seemed faintly barbarous. The big show that opened in Paris last month--drawings and prints at the Bibliotheque Nationale, 163 paintings at the Grand Palais--marking the 200th anniversary of Corot's birth, is unlikely to bring that feeling back. (It travels to Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada in the summer and to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art in the fall.) But it's worth seeing, since though Corot may not be as good as people once thought, he's much better than we now tend to suppose.

Part of the problem is, and long has been, the fakes. Corot was so popular on both sides of the Atlantic that he was, notoriously, the most faked artist of the 19th century. Corot painted 3,000 pictures, the saying went, of which 10,000 have been sold in America. His late work in particular--those silvery, atmospheric nymph-and-willow scenes like Memory of Mortefontaine, 1864, elegiac in tone and populated by rustic figures who descended from Claude Lorrain's shepherdesses--fetched record prices at a time when Impressionism still seemed rather daring to most Americans, and painting posthumous versions of them became quite an industry.

The show's catalog gives some bizarre detail on this, including the case of an obsessive Corot collector in France, a Dr. Jousseaume, who died in the early 1920s and left a collection of 2,414 works by Corot, every one of which turned out to be phony. And then there were the innocent copies, the homages to Corot by later artists and the copies of Corot by Corot himself. No wonder that even certifiably genuine Corots began to look just a little suspicious.

Why did he have such a vast reputation? Largely because he was seen as a living bridge between the classical tradition of French landscape and contemporary painting, whether by contemporary you meant the Barbizon painters of the mid-19th century, like Theodore Rousseau and Charles Daubigny, or the more recent vision of Monet and the Impressionists. Corot's career began in the 1820s, at a time when classical landscape--the ideal scene with temples, ruins and mellow boscage, populated by figures out of Ovid's Metamorphoses or Vergil's Georgics--was still very much a part of French art. Its greatest exponents, Nicolas Poussin and Lorrain, were French, and their work still cast a long shadow. But it existed alongside a newer appetite for natural vision, the direct recording of the facts of landscape, whose wellhead was the English artist John Constable.

Constable's paintings were the sensation of the 1824 Paris Salon, and their complex freshness came as a revelation to younger French artists, including the 28-year-old Corot, who was on the verge of departing for Italy. Today it's hard to imagine the delicious feelings of initiation and surrender with which foreign artists once went to Italy. Each view in Rome, every corner of Naples or Latium, seemed impregnated with meaning--by the memory of artists who had painted them before, by the presence of Antiquity and by the mellow beauty of the light. But to see Nature so authoritatively fused with Culture could also be a misery for a newcomer, for how could you say something new about it? "This sun sheds a light that fills me with despair," Corot moaned in a letter to a friend on the first of his sojourns in Italy (1825-28). "I feel all the impotence of my palette."

Despite his doubts--and he was a man of excessive modesty--Corot's early responses to Italy have a special place in his work, and in French art as a whole. They are small, painted on the spot and marvelously fresh, done with a truth of tone worthy of Constable. Tone, not line or color, describes the distances and shapes in these studies. Corot painted them directly, with a loaded brush, and they show an extreme sensitivity to atmosphere. Their light is clear and mild, and under it each plane in the jumble of Roman roofs and walls becomes part of a coherent spatial whole that delights your eye; nobody has ever rendered the exact effect of sunlight on stucco more beguilingly than Corot when young.

Corot's small oils of subjects like the view from the Pincio across Santa Trinita del Monte and the panorama of Rome below, and his studies of rustic places like Civita Castellana, were never meant to be shown in public. Until 1849 none were. They were intended solely as preparations for larger studio compositions, but these rarely have the elan and directness of his first insights. For him they were triggers of memory. "After my excursions," he wrote, "I invite Nature to come and spend a few days at home with me; brush in hand, I hunt for nuts in the forest of my studio; there, I hear the birds sing, the trees shiver in the wind."

Corot was lucky in having a modest private income--his parents were well-off dressmakers in Paris--and he did not need to labor constantly on the big machines that spelled success or failure at the Salons. So he could work on the studies for their own sake, and these, not the bigger works, entitle him to be seen as a true precursor of Impressionism. Many of his lithographs and etchings of landscape have the same vitality. Full of wind and weather, they show pleasure in the mark for its own sake--Corot was a terrific scribbler at his best--and some are boldly experimental. In the 1850s Corot was among the first artists to explore the so-called cliche-verre, a way of printmaking that entailed covering a sheet of glass with opaque collodion, scratching the design through it, then placing it over photosensitized paper and exposing it to light--an early hybrid of etching and photography.

The official Corot is generally a bore. The nymphs, shepherds and Sileni who decorate the big classical landscapes of his middle years are inert and stereotyped. He didn't have the temperament for the sensuousness Poussin put in his classical scenes; Corot's nymphs are just studio models. In Bacchante with a Panther, 1860, the girl teasing the big cat with what appears to be a dead starling looks like Mlle. Goosepimple, thanks to the gray French skies above and the damp earth under her bottom.

Corot was much better at trees than people, let alone pagan divinities. His weakest drawings are of the figure, his strongest of vegetable nature--one especially, an ink drawing of creepers on a rock done around 1827, has a wiry inquisitorial line and a fierce truth to the motif that remind one, without exaggeration, of Durer. In landscape his hand roamed free, giving the foreground hill in Volterra, the Citadel, 1834, a lively splotching of indeterminate dark scrub whose excited marks carry more visual weight than the distant hill town. But his early portraits are maladroit Ingres, and he was almost incapable of bringing off large biblical or literary compositions: his late painting of Dante and Vergil menaced by the she-wolf at the edge of the Dark Wood has to be one of the most bathetic illustrations for the Inferno ever made--not only the animals but the poets themselves look stuffed.

And yet in his last years, from 1865 or so until his death, Corot produced an exquisite series of small figure paintings, mostly of young women sitting before the easel in the brown clutter of his studio. Some remind you of Chardin, others are prophecies of Whistler. Interrupted Reading, circa 1870-73, is strikingly modern in its broadly painted triangular planes of muted color, regulated by two patches of black--the model's hair and her bodice--and relieved only by some red coral beads. Its Raphaelesque formal clarity looks back to neoclassicism but also forward to Picasso's dropsical women. It shows that, for Corot, the lessons of Italy never ended.