Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
French; 19th-century
Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery
84%
Hilly Landscape. c1870. Oil on canvas
It's hard to think of a more thinly painted painting than this — and not just thin, but purposefully thin, thin in a way that organizes everything else that's going on here, that stewards every one of this picture's effects. The whole brown bottom portion, arcing to cradle that mandorla of golden earth at center, is burlap just barely spattered with paint. All those light touches and soaked-seeming sections are there to haul the literal canvas into the painting's representational system, but they do little else (and that's good). The "scene" above is more heavily painted, but even there the weave of the canvas is ever-visible, and it often grades out into raw canvas, as at the edges of the canvas or in the spaces between the trees' branches. All this thinness so precisely deployed does two things. First, it sets things up so that in the few places where paint is really piled — a crop of clouds at top left; some yellows there in the middle — the effect of corpulence, of picture-rupturing presence, is magnified. Second, it marshals your eye around the swooping composition, which with so much movement and so little there might otherwise have lost itself in itself. (TFS, 2025)
Ghent, Belgium: Museum voor Schone Kunsten
80%
The Chaise-Marie Quarry at Fontainebleau. 1831. Oil on canvas
Looking at these earlier Corots reminds you that, several decades after this work was made, the great leap forward of modernist painting's first flash in France wasn't exactly the invention of abstraction as such, but rather of a way to begin ordering abstractness and to put it, consciously, towards self-critical ends. There's much more structure, in fact, in your average Courbet than there is in this jagged, breathy Corot — and that's neither good nor bad, aesthetically. Corot is the great painter of his period because of his prolepsis, but this is also what places him a tier below his best successors, who provided substance and purpose to the things he simply got to first. You could say that the crux of this painting is that shelf of striated gray-green at right, and you could say that in the lead-up to it all these strewn stones flit back and forth between demarcating the scene and devolving into contour and color. You'd be right, and you'd be wrong. This painting lacks the ability to justify its own extremity, but even still it's mostly a success. (TFS, 2026)