Silverpoint

Primary master · French · 1796 to 1875

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

One never saw him without charcoal in his hand.

Corot is the rare master whose own life maps the whole of this program. He arrived in Rome at the end of 1825, aged twenty-nine, and spent three years drawing the city and the Campagna with a sharp lead pencil: hill towns, aqueducts, parapets and arches set down with what one cataloguer called a force of execution that vies with accuracy of observation. Around 220 drawings and 150 oil studies came home with him. That is the LINE half of this course.

Forty years later the same man was working almost entirely in charcoal, turning the stick on its side to lay broad tone, lifting lights out with bread and a stump, and drawing landscapes from memory that he titled Souvenir. He said he composed by value rather than colour, and his students recorded that he taught form and values first and let colour and finish come afterward. That is the MASS half.

He organised every landscape into what he called three divisions of light: a foreground with the deepest darks and strongest contrasts, a midground of halftones, and a distance of pale, close values. Learn that one idea and half of landscape drawing is yours.

He also printed. His etchings and his cliché-verre plates (drawings scratched into a coated glass plate and printed photographically) are the best place to watch him build tone from pure line, which is exactly the skill the architectural half of this course demands.

Bent Tree by the Water, Corot, 1860/70
Art Institute of Chicago

Corot, Bent Tree by the Water, 1860/70. Charcoal, with stumping and erasing, on cream wove paper, laid down on cream board.

The Art Institute of Chicago · Harold Joachim Birthday Fund, purchased with funds provided by the Alsdorf Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. William O. Hunt and Frank B. Hubachek

What to steal

  1. 1The three divisions of light. Decide them before the first mark, and never let the distance borrow a dark from the foreground.
  2. 2Trees as masses that catch light, with branches that zig-zag upward and vanish into the clumps. Not one branch ends in open air.
  3. 3The young Corot's contour: a hard, sharp pencil, almost no shading, every edge placed exactly, acres of untouched paper.
  4. 4The old Corot's charcoal: side of the stick, grain of the paper left for air, edges lost on purpose, lights lifted rather than left.
  5. 5The souvenir: look hard, turn away, draw what the memory kept. Memory is the best filter for detail ever invented.

How to look

  • 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.

Works

60 public-domain