Corot's Women - from the everyday to magic

Agostina

What could be more hackneyed and traditional? A traditional nineteenth-century painter has composed a roomful of figure paintings, almost all of women, posed by everyday models wearing traditional rustic dress and holding a trite object such as a guitar or paint brush. And yet the exhibition (at the Washington National Gallery of Art) was pure magic. Corot seems to have captured something fundamental in these works. This is not achieved by heavy-handed symbolism, like much 19th-century narrative art; the least successful of these works are often the pictures trying to convey the most. A Saint Sebastian fails because he is not just a figure in a landscape; we are trying to read more into it. Sebastian’s face is almost completely hidden, and certainly, the faces appear to be a key to the mystery.

Woman with a pearl

Corot’s Woman with a Pearl, around 1860, is one of his finest portraits. The clothes are traditional; the pose completely relaxed, not challenging the painter; this is not a virtuoso piece. And yet the handling is exquisite, and what is conveyed is a sense of something deep and elemental. As with Matisse, Corot had the gift of transforming an everyday human figure, with banal clothes and postures, into something that seems to strike a deep chord within us. That something is certainly female; it is the dress, a traditional costume, that seems to communicate something eternal rather than transient. Any real human is of the moment – their language, their habits, their appearance – but in a painting by Corot, the transient seems to communicate something deeper. We know perfectly well that it is a trick, that a photograph of the same situation would be truly banal, but we willingly participate in the artist’s transformation of the model into something deeper and more significant.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Corot’s landscapes have a similar quality of capturing something significant from a trivial view. I can look at hundreds of 19th-century landscapes with indifference, but a Corot landscape is almost always recognisable from across a gallery; perhaps partly because Corot is satisfied with a very un-picturesque, ordinary of the view, but partly for the exquisite brushstrokes that make up the overall effect of the painting, a technique full of movement. When viewed closely, the brush strokes are loose and seemingly casual. This is the opposite of (say) Van Eyck’s detail and precision; it is wonderfully alive.

As soon as you make a claim for Corot’s figures, you can find successful examples that do not conform with that claim. Thus, for example, you could claim that Agostina (1866), one of the best figure paintings, has something of Picasso about it. The model has an elemental heaviness, with an exaggerated roundness of the hips. You feel from the painting that this figure has not moved for thousands of years. It is not conventionally beautiful: the shoulders are unusually slanted rather than horizontal. The head seems almost reduced to a cylinder above the body. The result is a sense of stillness about the figure as if it were archetypal, as if this figure could have been standing there in ancient Greece.

Springtime of Life

Other paintings, such as the portentously titled Springtime of Life (1871), while still figure studies, have nothing corporeal about them. They place the figure firmly within, and equally important with, the landscape. The face is almost hidden, and the body takes up less than half the height of the frame. This is not a figure study; this is a draped figure in a landscape. Nonetheless, the impression is very powerful. Leaves on nearby shrubs and plants around the figure are painted with simple flicks of paint, expressing a kind of endless movement, so that the stasis of the woman is contrasted to the motion all around, a kind of state of perpetual flux. It is almost as if the landscape around is responding to the draperies of the dress, a celebration of femaleness that transforms the model.

 

Lady in Blue

Strangely, the nudes by Corot are not the most successful works in this show. Perhaps it is in the depiction of clothes and landscape where Corot excels, rather than the body alone. One of the best examples is the late Lady in Blue (1874), which has a woman in profile, leaning against some furniture, and wearing a grand blue dress that is the centre of attention. You are reminded of the traditional photographers who offered to create tableaux for their clients, so that you could dress up so that for a fleeting moment and become something exotic.  This is a painting about the magic of painting, its ability to transcend the dull reality it is situated in.

The blue dress appears to have lifted the figure out of the anonymous and drab background, and transformed the figure into something significant. It is a kind of magic indeed.