Image size of this print is 30 x 21.

MADAME STUMPF AND HER DAUGHTER by Jean-Baptise-Camille Corot (Fr., 1796-1875) National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, the first of the great modern landscapists, was born in Paris. The son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Corot was a businessman before he became, at the age of twenty-six, an artist. Consequently, he was able to paint without the necessity of selling his work. After a period of study with two academic painters, Corot went to Italy in 1825 where he spent two years roaming the countryside outside Rome as had Claude Lorrain two centuries before. Unlike Claude, however, Corot did not sketch; he painted directly from nature upon small canvases, observing carefully, translating his visual experiences directly and concentrating on architectural clarity and the play of light upon volume. This process led to an entirely new concept of landscape painting. Corot kept his discoveries to himself, however, and sent only Neoclassical landscapes to the Paris Salons.
In 1828 he returned to France to paint in the soft, gentle light of the Ile-de-France, near Paris. In this period, Corot produced a group of hazy landscapes with misty grays veiling nature's color, an effect achieved by overpainting while his underpainting was still wet. This was a revolutionary step that led further along the path followed by the Impressionists. Corot continued to paint in almost entire obscurity and it was not until 1848 that it became known that he also painted figures with an exquisite poetic grace