Here we turn for a comparison to Camille Corot (1796–1875), a great
independent landscape artist whose working life spanned the period from
the beginnings of Delacroix to the birth of Impressionism. Corot also painted
numerous scenes with trees in the foreground, such as The Bridge at Mantes
(c. 1868–1870). Corot painted oil sketches in the open air a great deal.
Plein-air (“open-air”) painting was common enough before the
Impressionists, but earlier painters were just sketching, not producing
¿ nished paintings outdoors. Such artists preferred to paint under controlled
conditions, and they saw lighting as an artistic device, not a subject. Painting
larger, ¿ nished works out-of-doors,
especially paintings intended to catch the
effects of light and weather, would not
have been practical before the invention
of the paint tube in the 1840s.Of course,
painting outdoors meant carrying a
heavy load. It was hard work, as we can
see in Daumier’s humorous lithograph
Landscape Painters at Work (1862).
Cézanne also painted out-of-doors, often
walking many miles daily to a particular
site that he wanted to record. We see here
as an example, his Mont Sainte-Victoire
and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley
(c. 1885). Mont St.-Victoire preoccupied
Cézanne throughout his years in Aix-en-Provence. This limestone ridge is not
at all impressive by Alpine standards, but it so dominates the low landscape
of Provence that it is noble and commanding. Cézanne had grown up with
the mountain, and he studied it as Monet studied his waterlily garden. He saw
it as a living presence, always the same, yet always changing as he changed
his point of view, or focused on some particular aspect of it, or analyzed its
structure, contours, volumes, or colors. In this painting, we see that Cézanne
has pushed the mountain to the left, now secondary to the Arc Valley in front
of it. The artist painted the valley with measured strokes of carefully gauged
color. Our eye steps slowly into the painting with the strokes and blocks of
color, then À ows more continuously with the curving road. The small arches
of the viaduct in the distance are not merely a record of this landscape feature
It is probably true that
Pissarro never created a
single great masterpiece
on the order of Renoir’s
Luncheon or Monet’s
greatest waterlily
paintings, but he did paint
a large number of bold
and beautiful paintings in
his long lifetime.