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Corot: Women
Mary Morton
Corot: Women is the catalog of the 2018 National Gallery of Art exhibition that gathered, for the first time, the figure paintings of an artist famous for something else entirely. Camille Corot is remembered as a landscape master, but throughout his career he also painted women—models in the studio, figures in Italian costume, quiet nudes, and an allegorical series of the model with easel and lyre—works he largely kept for himself. Curated by Mary Morton, the National Gallery's head of French paintings, the show brought some forty of these intimate, self-possessed pictures together, and the catalog surrounds them with essays on Corot's debt to the old masters, the place of the model in his art, and the pressures of photography and a changing art world. The result reveals a lesser-known Corot—tender, monumental, surprisingly modern. For lovers of French painting, it's a quietly revelatory book.
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The author
Mary Morton is a curator and head of the department of French paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and a specialist in nineteenth-century French art. She organized the Corot: Women exhibition and edited its catalog.
The book
Published in 2018 by the National Gallery of Art with Yale University Press, the catalog accompanied the exhibition (on view September–December 2018) of roughly forty of Corot's figure paintings. Essays by Morton, David Ogawa, Sébastien Allard, and Heather McPherson address the figures' relation to his landscapes, the role of the model, and the impact of photography.
How to read it
As an argument for a neglected side of a familiar artist. The pictures—many kept private in Corot's lifetime—reward slow looking, and the essays supply the context that makes their quiet strangeness legible.
For more context
Read alongside general studies of Corot's landscapes and of the artist's model in nineteenth-century France.
Sources
- Type
- Exhibition catalog
- Author / Maker
- Mary Morton
- Publisher
- National Gallery of Art / Yale
- Year
- 2018
- ISBN
- 9780300236736
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine