Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Environs of Gruyéres Switzerland, 1865

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Environs of Gruyeres, Switzerland

200 words

This little pastoral landscape by Corot is easy to miss in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is already behind you before your second footfall enters the main hallway of the impressionist wing. The sliver of wall next to the opening, called a jamb, where this little masterpiece fits neatly. My eye follows the path of staffed figures and cows, but stops upon the tree. Corot subverts my expectation of what a painting is and how they are made. The illusory Northern light that consumes the painting and held onto the thin branches of the tree are not painted white at all, but scraped into the paint to reveal the lightened canvas below, the primal substrate of this nominal space the memory of temperature and breathe that Corot held this as an object a rectangle. The content might be dismissed and applied the portmonteau ‘blandscape.’ The glimpse of rural life gleaned in rearview mirror. However, the Corot, his bristles turned backward, brought to life an incredible tree cloyingly framed in the sacchrine like sushi on a plate of cotton candy.