Papa Corot
THE prolific forgeries of Corot and his own dan- gerous generosity in sign- ing the work of unsuccess- ful friends are reasons why it has been so diffi- cult to see the French master justly and whole.
well-authenticated Corot exhibition, gathered' till Happily a various and December from major collections, now fills the Marlborough Gallery with his Virgilian spirit.
Best of all there are his portraits in which his ease can be most enchanting. There is his plain model who, one can suppose, was abruptly stopped in her act of 'undressing for the pose. His alertness perceived that here was his sub- ject in this accidental but perfect arrangement of slipping white dress and blonde flesh and notes of .black, all painted with superb breadth. At such moments there is no tinge of Corot's sentimentality, only the instinctive reaction to life of a painter of the petit bourgeois class. As unidealised are his early moving study of a beggar boy in a battered top hat, and the quite unaffected classicism of Mademoiselle de Foudras in an ivory dress modelled as simply with a dense luminous impasto. Such modest acquaintances could be portrayed with the im- mediacy of a Manet. It is when Corot's vision is clouded by a daydream of some wounded Eurydice that one is oppressed by the muzzi- ness of his response to the perilous current of poetical feeling in the mid-nineteenth century.
True, a mood of reverie was inherent in Corot's nature. Even when painting the Roman landscape directly before him, something of Claude's pensive feeling pervades it. Here his sensitive treatment of light, form and distance in terms of tonal values could always produce fresh and delicately surprising colour harmonies. In one of Corot's sharpest, most brilliant master- pieces, the Louvre's Rome, la Trinite des Monts, the penetrating intensity of his contemplation of sunlit walls and receding planes carries the thrill of his first Italian journey when his every sense was deliciously excited and unappeased. Responsive as of course he was to the romantic- classic tug-of-war and legacy of his time (com- pared with the eagle Delacroix, Corot modestly declared himself only a lark), his incorruptible honesty to his own impressions stirred the im- pressionists. At times his sparkling air has almost the quality of Renoir's, and it is not surprising that Monet knelt to Papa Corot.
`Everything is true in its own time, place, cir- cumstance,' wrote D. H. Lawrence, 'and untrue out of its own place, 'time, circumstance.' Some part of Corot, nevertheless, has always rung true to succeeding generations. Our grandparents re- vered his silvery twilight 'Souvenirs'—insuffer- able, we may believe, to Braque with his solid Corot reproduction pinned up during work on his Cubist portraits. Shrink as we may from the more cloying 'Souvenirs,' these remain as true to his musical sensibility, most susceptible to the opera and 'ballet which engender his nymphs frisking before misty back-cloths. But at once the attention is held when these stage- properties vanish in the light of day, melt in the sunlit air enveloping the sandy ochres, powdery greens and grey of land extending to a far, clear horizon.
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