The Mantes bridge, Ca. 1860-1870.
Oil on panel., H. 0.31 m; W. 0.4 m
Signed lower left: COROT.
Provenance: Sale Alfred Feydeau, Hotel Drouot, Paris, 22 mai 1902, lot no. 3.
Sotheby’s, Londres , 20 mars 1985, lot 102.
Private collection, France.
A. Robaut, L’œuvre de Corot : catalogue raisonné et illustré, Paris 1905, vol 3, n°1970, p. 230, ill. p. 231.
A student of the pre-eminent landscape painters Achille-Etna Michallon and Jean-Victor Bertin, Corot has an illustrious career as a landscape painter. Although a devoted student of paysage historique and deeply attached to the lessons of his masters, Corot pioneer a modern movement of young landscapists of the 1830s and 1840s, called the Barbizon school. Unlike their predecessors of neoclassical landscape painting, Corot and his followers seek in their native France the charms that their teachers had found primarily in Italy. He introduces both realism and naturalism into landscape painting and initited a modern landscape tradition in France. Corot’s art alone provides a bridge from the world of Neoclassicism to the world of Impressionism and is regarded as the central figure of nineteenth century plein-air painting.
