National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Corot was modest and chaste. He never married, in company was nearly always overlooked, the Salon ‘treated him rudely,’ and the only painting by him to enter the Luxembourg Museum was ‘bought almost accidentally by the state in 1851’.1Yet the great Charles Baudelaire was one of many who admired the qualities of simplicity and sureness in Corot’s art and personality – traits that were at the opposite extreme to Baudelaire’s flamboyance. Corot, he wrote, exerted complete control over his compositions, guaranteeing that every element would be well seen, well observed, well understood and well imagined.2 In Bridge on the Saône River at Mâcon the paint has been laid on directly and unaffectedly. This gives the small work a deceptive look of Impressionism. With their festive and casual appearance, Impressionist paintings were to make a holiday of looking. But Corot’s washerwomen on the river bank are not Monet’s or Manet’s holidaymakers lolling about and enjoying the sun. Likewise, Corot in front of nature seems a