Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Le Fermier de Pithiviers

Corot was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker who is considered a great master of landscape painting in the 19th century. A pivotal figure in landscape painting, his vast output (over 3,000 paintings) simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. In the spring of 1829, Corot came to Barbizon to paint in the Forest of Fontainebleau, he had first painted in the forest at Chailly in 1822. He returned to Barbizon in the autumn of 1830 and in the summer of 1831, where he made drawings and oil studies, from which he made a painting intended for the Salon of 1830. The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870.