Venus Disarming Cupid
1852/57 · Charcoal, with stumping, scraping and erasing, heightened with white gouache, on dark cream wove paper with inclusions · 38.7 × 25.8 cm (15 1/4 × 10 3/16 in.)
Corot, Venus Disarming Cupid, 1852/57. Charcoal, with stumping, scraping and erasing, heightened with white gouache, on dark cream wove paper with inclusions.
The Art Institute of Chicago · Regenstein Endowment Fund
How to look at a Corot
- Squint first. Count the masses. If you count more than four, squint harder.
- Find the lightest light (nearly always sky, or water reflecting sky) and the darkest dark (nearly always a foreground tree trunk or a shadow under foliage). Everything else sits between them.
- In the Italian graphite sheets, notice how much paper is untouched and how few lines describe a whole hill town. Then notice that every one of those lines is exactly placed.
- In the late charcoals, look for where an edge disappears: a trunk into shadow, a hill into sky. Those lost edges are the air.
- In the etchings, half-close your eyes until the lines vanish and only tones remain. That is what he was building.
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