1868
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Landscape (The Large Tree) is a 1868 by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A big tree stretches across the paper, its branches dark against a soft sky. Hills roll in the distance, and a few tiny figures stand near the trunk. Corot drew this with charcoal, smudging and pressing the stick sideways to make wide, smoky shapes. He carried charcoal everywhere, sketching outdoors to catch the quiet mood of the countryside. At the time, landscapes were seen as less important than history paintings—Corot worked to change that. Look up *sfumato* to see how other artists blurred edges like this.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot used sticks of charcoal, a powdery black medium, to dramatic effect in this late-career landscape, layering them and turning them on their side to form tonal areas and fine lines. Describing the period when the drawing was made, a colleague wrote that “one never saw [Corot] without . . . charcoal in his hand.” Such artworks conveyed the poetry the artist saw in nature and advanced his lifelong ambition of elevating landscape from the lowly status it held at the conservative French Academy. Here, he aimed to capture an evocative mood rather than a specific place,…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (UK: KORR-oh, US: kə-ROH, kor-OH; French: ; 16 July 1796 – 22 February 1875), or simply Camille Corot, was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching.
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