The Pre-Impressionists: Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796; he died in Paris in 1875, the year after the First Impressionist Exhibition. The freedom and sensitivity with which he responded to the changing moods of landscape put him at the forefront of the plein-air artists of the Barbizon School, and make him perhaps the most important precursor of Impressionism. Corot's leaves dance in the canvas before your eyes, caught in an ever-changing light. The clearest path from Corot to Impressionism can be seen in the work of Camille Pissarro. Pissarro listed himself as Corot's pupil in the catalogues to the Paris Salons of 1864 and 1865. One of the four radical young artists who teamed up at the Académie Suisse in 1859 - Pissarro, Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin, Paul Cézanne - Camille Pissarro was the only artist to participate in all eight Impressionist exhibitions in Paris. Just as Corot had been free with his help, advice, and encouragement to the young Pissarro, and to Eugène Boudin, Berthe Morisot, and Alfred Sisley, so Pissarro was happy to pass on his experience to the Post-Impressionists such as Seurat, Gauguin, and van Gogh. So the influence of Corot can be strongly felt not just in his contemporaries at Barbizon, but right through Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

Félix Bracquemond, Corot
Etching, 1861

Corot's own training was rooted in Neoclassicism. The aesthetic of his teachers Achille Etna Michallon and Jean-Victor Bertin links Corot to artists such as David and Ingres, Lorrain and Poussin, and explains the nymphs that tend to pop up in otherwise realistic landscapes by Corot, especially in his earlier phases. It was his discovery of the English landscapists J.M.W. Turner and John Constable that freed Corot from the tired formalities of Neoclassicism. Turner and Constable inspired both the Barbizon artists and the Impressionists - just not their own countrymen.

Camille Corot, Souvenir de Toscane
Etching, 1845
Delteil 1 (iv/iv), Melot 1 (iv/iv)

Besides his oil paintings and drawings, Camille Corot was also a printmaker, and in his printmaking practice he very nearly approaches Impressionism. He created 14 stunning etchings, of which I have a copy of the first, Souvenir de Toscane, dating from 1845. The magnificent freedom, the wildness, of this Italian landscape puts the viewer right on the spot, feeling the wind on your face. 1845 was the year Corot was hailed by Charles Baudelaire as the leader of "the modern school of landscape painting." This proto-Impressionist memory of Tuscany was the first etching Corot ever made. Twenty years later Félix Bracquemond found the unbitten plate in a box of nails, and convinced Corot to rework and print it. The first proofs were pulled in 1865, but it was not editioned until 1875.

Camille Corot, Souvenir de Basse-Bréau
Cliché-verre, 1858
Delteil 73 (i/i), Melot 73 (i/i)

Corot also gleefully experimented with a new technique, the cliché-verre, invented by his friend Constant Dutilleux, Dutilleux's son-in-law Charles Desavary, the drawing professor Louis Grandguillaume, and Adalbert Cuvelier, an industrialist and paint manufacturer. By this means a drawing made on a prepared glass plate could be printed onto light-sensitive paper, very much in the manner of the "photogram" technique later invented by Max Ernst and Man Ray. Corot made 66 clichés-verre, and encouraged other Barbizon artists such as Daubigny, Millet, and Rousseau to try the technique too. He liked the freedom it gave to make images direct from nature that could then be printed back in the studio. Corot typically made only one or two prints from each cliché-verre, but many of the original plates survived in the collection of Eugène Cuvelier, and in 1921 Maurice le Garrec (successor of the gallerist Emond Sagot) published 15 of them in an edition of 150 copies in the portfolio Quarante clichés-verre. This also contained 16 plates by Charles-François Daubigny, 2 by Jean-François Millet, 2 by Théodore Rousseau, and 1 by Eugène Delacroix. One of Corot's plates has five subjects on one plate, hence there were really 36 rather than 40 clichés-verre in total. I am lucky to have acquired one of the Corots, Souvenir de Basse-Bréau, made in 1858.

Walter Sickert, The Boatman
Etching and aquatint after Camille Corot, 1890

Besides these original prints, Corot was happy for his work to be interpreted by other etchers. Some of those who made interpretative etchings after Corot are significant artists in their own right, such as Walter Sickert, Henri Guérard, Marcel Roux, and Félix Bracquemond. On a quick count, I have 19th-century etchings after Camille Corot by at least 30 artists, showing just how popular Corot's art became.

Étienne Gabriel Bocourt, Camille Corot
Etching, 1882

Camille Corot himself seems to have been an equally popular figure. Often known affectionately as Père Corot, he was a hugely generous and encouraging man, confident in his own art but quite humble and modest in his attitude to it. I like his response to a friend who questioned him on his views on the afterlife. "Well, at any rate," Corot said, "I hope we shall go on painting up there."

The Pre-Impressionists: Charles Jacque and Léon Jacque

Hello everyone. I'm not intending to revive this blog, as I simply don't have the time, but I have found a few posts that are so nearly complete that it seems a shame not to post them. So here's an addition to the posts I made about Barbizon artists quite a while back.

The Jacque brothers, Charles Émile and Léon, are minor figures in the Barbizon School compared to Corot, Millet, Rousseau, and Daubigny, but their art has an honesty and charm that still keeps it alive today. Charles Émile Jacque was born in Paris in 1813, and died there in 1894. The younger brother Léon Jacque was born in 1828, and surprisingly his date of death appears to be unknown. I haven't come across any work by Léon Jacque after 1872, so I would hazard a guess at a death in the early 1870s. The whole Jacque family seem to have been artistically gifted; there are also Charles Jacque's sons Émile, Frédéric, and Maurice, and a Marcel Jacque who seems to be some kind of relation.

Léopold Massard, Charles Émile Jacque

Etching, 1884

Charles Émile Jacque was born and died in Paris. Charles was apprenticed to an engraver of maps at the age of 17; wishing to become an artist, he made his first original etching at this period, a head of a woman after Rembrandt. Unable to support himself as an artist, Charles Jacque then joined the army for a period of seven years, taking part in the siege of Anvers. During this time Jacque continued making drawings, which he sold for a franc apiece. After a further two years as a wood engraver in England, Charles Jacque returned to France, and established himself in Paris.

Charles Jacque, L'escalier

Etching, 1845

Charles Jacque, Les Gaudes

Relief etching (procédé Comte), 1852

Charles Jacque, A Cottage

Etching, 1865

Charles Jacque, La fenêtre de l'auberge

Etching after Adraen van Ostade, 1845

Charles Jacque

Etching after Meindert Hobbema

William Brassey Hole, Le retour du troupeau

Etching after Charles Émile Jacque, 1888

Charles Jacque made his Salon debut with etchings in 1845. Jacque became a prominent member of the group of plein-air landscape painters known as the Barbizon School. He was particularly close to Théodore Rousseau, and influenced by Millet, who was his neighbour at Barbizon for many years.

Léon Jacque, L'étable

Etching, 1864

Léon Jacque, Environ de Fontainebleau

Etching, 1864

Léon Jacque, Pensée amoureuse (femme de profil cousant)

Etching after Edmé Bouchardon, 1864

Léon Jacque exhibited at the Salon de Paris for only a brief period, from 1864-1866, and contributed original etchings to the revue L'Artiste between 1863 and 1872. His brief career seems to have been lived very much in his older brother's shadow, yet Léon Jacque was a very accomplished artist in his own right. I wish I knew more about him.

Marcel Jacque, La bouillie

Etching after Jean-François Millet, date unknown

I would guess the etching above, made  by Marcel Jacque in facsimile of the original 1861 etching by Millet, dates from around the mid-1890s, when Eugène Delâtre commissioned various artists to create loving facsimiles of Millet's etchings, the original plates being no longer available. I'll reproduce more of these when I get round to Millet in this series of posts on the Pre-Impressionists.

The Pre-Impressionists: Paul Huet

Paul Huet was born in Paris in 1803. was a pupil of Antoine-Jean Gros and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, and a friend and associate of Delacroix and Bonington. He was inspired like other Barbizon School artists by the art of John Constable (exhibited in Paris in 1824). While Huet's oils are sedate and conservative, his watercolours have a freshness that really sings; if he had been a Post-Impressionist rather than a Pre-Impressionist, he would no doubt have applied the vibrant colour sense shown in his watercolours to his oils. The Impressionists  shunned brown and black; if Huet had done the same, his work would have been transformed. There's a good brief biography with selections of his art here.

Paul Huet, Vieilles maisons sur le port de Honfleur

Etching, 1866

Alongside his paintings and watercolours, Paul Huet was also a printmaker. He published his first lithographs in 1829 and his first etchings in 1834. He died in 1869, and both my examples of his etched work date from his last years (both reprinted in 1911). The first is a charming but rather conventional scene of the harbour at Honfleur.

Paul Huet, Soirée d'été - les baigneuses

Etching, 1867

The second is something else entirely. It anticipates much of the Impressionist style in its fresh, loose approach, and its fascination with the play of light and shade.  I can't help feeling Paul Cézanne must have known this etching (or the painting of the same subject displayed at the Salon of 1866), as its dreamlike scene of bathers disporting themselves in a river on a summer's evening seems to anticipate his own treatment of similar scenes.

The Pre-Impressionists: Charles-Francois Daubigny

Charles-François Daubigny was born in Paris in 1817. One of the leading artists of the Barbizon School, Daubigny is a significant fore-runner of Impressionism. Because of the impressionistic nature of his oils, which seemed unfinished to the tastemakers of the day, his works were criticized as "rough sketches".

Charles Chaplin, Daubigny
Etching, 1862
Béraldi 3

Daubigny was a very active printmaker, creating 127 etchings, aquatints, and drypoints, 18 clichés-verre, and 4 lithographs. I have six of his etchings to share with you.

Charles-François Daubigny, Le marais
Etching, 1851
Delteil/Melot 84

The earliest etching I have by Daubigny is Le marais, dating from 1851 though my copy is from the 1874 printing for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Although this is already no. 84 in the catalogue raisonné of Daubigny's etchings, it is actually right at the beginning of his true career as an original etcher, many of the earlier works being illustrative plates of little significance. I like the storks standing placidly in the marsh water, the twisted trees, and the skein of wild ducks in the sky. Incidentally, Michel Melot, in his Graphic Works of the Pre-Impressionists, gives the print-run of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts impression as 750 copies. I've often seen this figure given for the GBA, but I can't quite bring myself to accept it; I always give c.1500 copies as the print-run for the Gazette, which I think is probably more than were actually published, but 750 seems very low. However Melot was curator of the Département des Estampes at the Bibliothèque Nationale, so should know better than me.

Charles-François Daubigny, Soleil couchant
Etching, 1859
Delteil/Melot 92

Soleil couchant dates from 8 years later, during which time Daubigny has only added eight etchings to his tally, but in which his art has developed a looser feel, and a more pronounced concern with light effects.

Charles-François Daubigny, Les vendanges
Etching, 1865
Delteil/Melot 117

Les vendanges, from 1865, is a charming rural scene, with peasants crushing grapes in large vats, while cows rest placidly beside them, at the edge of the vineyard. My copy was reprinted from the original plate in 1923 for the art revue Byblis by the Chalcographie du Louvre; this was one of 27 copper plates donated to the Louvre by the artist's family.

Charles-François Daubigny, Le pré des graves à Villerville
Etching, 1875
Delteil/Melot 124

Charles-François Daubigny, Pommiers à Auvers
Etching, 1877
Delteil/Melot 126

Charles-François Daubigny, Claire de lune à Valmondois
Etching, 1877
Delteil/Melot 127

These last three etchings show a big shift from the pleasant but rather conventional aesthetic of Les vendanges. They show, in fact, Charles-François Daubigny, the Pre-Impressionist. All three of them were created shortly after the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874. It's not very likely that Daubigny was directly influenced by that exhibition, but he was a great supporter of the radical new work of the Impressionists.  He resigned as a member of the jury of the Salon de Paris in 1865 when works by Cézanne and Pissarro were rejected, and resigned again in 1870 when Monet was rejected; it was Daubigny's suggestion that the spurned artists set up their own Salon de Réfusées. Daubigny was on friendly terms with Pissarro and Monet - Monet even copied Daubigny's idea of creating a makeshift painting studio on a boat. The three etchings above are three of the last four Daubigny ever made, right at the end of his life, and they show him leaping into the impressionist unknown. All were made for L'Illustration Nouvelle, published by Maison Cadart (by then run by Alfred Cadart's widow, Célonie-Sophie). Michel Melot calls the penultimate print, Pommiers à Auvers, "the most 'Impressionist' of Daubigny's etchings, done at a time when Pissarro had already begun to engrave". But I personally think that Claire de lune à Valmondois (Moonlight at Valmondois), the very last etching of Daubigny, is the most perfectly Impressionist, in its obsession with light, the Monet haystacks, the whole feel of a fleeting moment captured forever. According to Alfred de Lostalot, writing in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which also published this etching to mark Daubigny's passing, the plate was drawn two months before the artist's death. "He wished to burnish it, that is, tone down the haystacks and the tree-covered mountainsides that bound the horizon: death did not leave him time to do so." So maybe the illusion of Impressionism is simply the result of infirmity preventing Daubigny giving the plate a more "finished" feel. But I suspect not. He may have wondered about toning it down, but he didn't do so, probably because inside himself he knew it was as finished as it needed to be.

Léopold Massard, Charles Daubigny
Etching, 1882

Charles-François Daubigny died in Paris in 1878.

The Pre-Impressionists: Adolphe Appian

I intend this post to be first in a short series about the important fore-runners or precursors of Impressionism. Although the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 is regarded as an earthquake moment in the history of art, there had been plenty of warning tremors in the years leading up to it. The roots of Impressionism lie most obviously in the plein-art painters and printmakers of the Barbizon School, and I shall in due course be looking at Barbizon artists such as Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Charles-Émile Jacque, Jean-François Millet, and Théodore Rousseau. The Barbizon artists were inspired by the example of the English painter John Constable, just as the Impressionists were inspired by J. M. W. Turner. There were also plenty of artists working outside Barbizon with similar aims of capturing fleeting sensations of light and shade and representing the landscape as our minds actually apprehend it. Most of these had some contact with the Barbizon group, and my first subject, Adolphe Appian, is a case in point.

Adolphe Appian, L'étang de Frignon à Creys

Etching, 1962

Curtis & Prouté 1 (II/III)

Adolphe Appian was born in Lyon in 1818; his birth name was Jacques Barthélémy or Barthélémi Appian, and he first exhibited under the pseudonym Adolphe at the Salon de Paris in 1835. He studied drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon under Jean-Michel Grobon and Augustin Alexandre Thierrat. Appian was both a musician and a painter, and did not fully commit himself to the visual arts until 1852. This was the year Appian met Corot and Daubigny, both of whom profoundly influenced his style and approach; after this, while remaining based in Lyon, he made numerous trips to the forest of Fontainebleau to paint alongside the Barbizon artists. Michel Melot, in his exhibition catalogue for the centenary show of L'estampe impressioniste at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1974, writes of Appian's wish to resolve the problems of changing light, and to render visual sensations (air, water, leaves) in etching. If you look closely at the kinds of marks Appian uses to describe skies, reflections, or seas, you will see that these are not conventional notations, but freely expressive responses, designed to evoke rather than delineate.

Adolphe Appian, Le champ de blé

Etching, 1863

Curtis & Prouté 2 (III/IV)

Although Appian remained a provincial artist, working almost always in the region of Lyon, he did make his mark on the art world, exhibiting at the Salon de Paris from 1835 and the Salon de Lyon from 1847 (and regularly at both Salons from 1855), contributing etchings to L'Artiste and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and most importantly publishing etchings with the firm of Cadart. Appian was a prominent member of the Société des Aquafortistes from its foundation by Cadart in 1862 until its dissolution in 1867, and remained loyal to Cadart and his widow Célonie-Sophie until the collapse of the business on 12 January 1882.

Adolphe Appian, À gorge de Loup

Etching, 1863

Curtis & Prouté 5

The 1878 Cadart catalogue advertises a Collection de 25 Eaux-Fortes (Paysages et Marines) by Adolphe Appian for the sum of 50 francs. This title, Landscapes and Seascapes, does convey in simple terms Appian's ostensible subject-matter. But the truth is that for Appian, as for the Impressionists, the true subject of art is the play of light. This is very evident in his etchings, and even more so in his monotypes. He made around 33 of these, some true monotypes (painted directly onto the plate and printed only once), others painted on top of an already-etched plate. Most of these monotypes, from the Atherton Curtis collection, are housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; Melot's catalogue reproduces the etching Un Rocher dans les communaux de Rix alongside the same plate printed "en manière de monotype". The fact that the monotype was printed on the first state of the etching proves that Appian was already experimenting with monotype by 1865, three years before Paul Huet explored this technique and ten years before Degas. Appian was probably encouraged in his trials of different ways and intensities of inking an etching plate by Auguste Delâtre, who printed Appian's etchings from 1863 to 1869.

Adolphe Appian, Flotille de barques marchandes (Monaco)

Etching, 1872

Curtis & Prouté 34 (II/II)

Adolphe Appian made his first etching in 1853. Between then and 1896 he produced some 90 etchings, 4 lithographs, and around 33 monotypes. This is quite a serious printmaking output for someone whose main work was as a painter, and this is reflected in the fact that nowadays Appian is much more fêted for his etchings than for his paintings. The paintings tackle the same subjects as his etchings, with a strong preference for "contre-jour" motifs; these extravagant contrasts of light and dark show the influence of another artist loosely affiliated to Barbizon, Appian's friend Félix Ziem. After he discovered the light of the Mediterranean, Appian's palette lightened and his style became looser and more impressionistic.

Adolphe Appian, Environs de Martigues (Bouches de Rhone)

Etching, 1874

Curtis & Prouté 39

Adolphe Appian, Barque de pecheurs
(Barques de cabotage, Côtes d'Italie)
Etching, 1874
Curtis & Prouté 40 (II/III)

There is a good further selection of etchings by Adolphe Appian at Old Master Prints. The standard reference work is Atherton Curtis and Paul Prouté, Adolphe Appian, son oeuvre gravé et lithographié (1968).