Rural concert
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| Rural concert |
|---|
| Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot , 1844 to 1857 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 98 × 130 cm |
| Musée Condé , Chantilly , France |
Rural concert ( French: Le Concert champêtre ) is a painting by the French painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot , which was created between the years 1844 and 1857. Today the painting can be seen in the Musée Condé in the northern French city of Chantilly .
It shows three girls in the foreground who are sitting in a meadow. The first of them is playing a violoncello, the second is kneeling in the grass reading a book and the third, dressed in light blue and stretched out on the grass, rests her head on her hand and looks at the first two girls. In the background three other girls are shown picking fruit from the trees on the bank of a lake.
Corot began work on the painting in 1843. He got the inspiration for this motif on a trip to Switzerland, where he observed a group of young shepherd girls taking a break next to a bush. He enriched the motif with leaves from forests, as he had seen them on a lake in Italy, and with trees from the forest of Fontainebleau . Corot exhibited the work in 1844. In 1857 he decided to revise it. He replaced the meadow in the background with a pond in darker colors, and the young shepherd, who had leaned against a tree, with a swan that swims on the water of the pond. He set the horizon a little deeper so that the landscape darkened a little and gained in poetry. In 1857, Corot exhibited the painting in the drawing room, declaring that he had revised and corrected it. In 1872, however, he made changes to the foliage.
The structure of the picture, with leaves almost everywhere limiting the view like the curtains of a theater, is reminiscent of the structure of the pictures of the masters of the 17th century. The water surface in the background carries the view into the distance, where the blue water surface unites with the blue of the sky. The two groups of people form two triangular shapes. Corot used a light brushstroke that made the painting look a little blurry, like the first photographs that appeared in the artist's time and of which he owned a large quantity. The artist used a limited color palette where the blue tones of the sky and lake harmonize with the browns and greens of the plants. What is striking is the asymmetry between the right part of the picture, which is darker, and the left part, which is enlivened by the light and the women picking fruit.
The picture can be assigned to the school of Barbizon , whose members saw themselves in opposition to the classical conventions represented by the conservative Academy of Fine Arts . They got their inspiration from English landscape painting, particularly from the works of John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonington and the Dutch landscape painters of the 17th century.
literature
- Nicole Garnier-Pelle: Chantilly, musée Condé, Peintures des XIXème et XXème siècles (= Inventaire des collections publiques françaises ). Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997, ISBN 2-7118-3625-8 , pp. 90-92 .
- Florence Adam, Nicole Garnier-Pelle, Vincent Pomarède, Jean-Paul Riou et Anne Roquebert: Le Concert champêtre de Corot . Catalog de l'exposition du Musée Condé, 1996.
Individual evidence
- ^ French Ministry of Culture: Notice no 00000076477 . at Base Joconde , visited on December 8, 2013.
- ↑ a b c Académie d'Amiens, Portail éducatif du domaine de Chantilly: Fiche de l'œuvre Le concert champêtre(PDF; 4.9 MB) , visited on December 7, 2013