Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot came to painting late and without financial pressure. His father was a wigmaker and his mother ran a milliner's shop, both prosperous enough that at twenty-five they gave him a small allowance and let him abandon a career in the cloth trade to paint, a freedom that let him work at his own pace for the rest of his life. He spent years in Italy making rapid oil sketches outdoors, developing a loose, light-filled technique years ahead of the polished studio landscapes still expected by the Paris Salon.

Back in France he gravitated to the Forest of Fontainebleau after 1829, where a loose circle of painters dissatisfied with academic convention, among them Jean-François Millet and Théodore Rousseau, was forming what became known as the Barbizon School. Corot became its most celebrated figure, prized for silvery, atmospheric woodland scenes that sold well and made him comfortably rich even as younger radicals struggled.

He was also unusually generous with that success, helping poorer colleagues in trouble, and he personally tutored the young Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot, both future Impressionists who carried his commitment to painting directly from nature into the movement he never officially joined. He died in Paris in 1875, leaving behind more than three thousand paintings, a number swollen over the following decades by forgeries made in his style.