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.