Dreamer under Tall Trees (Le Reveur sous les grands arbres)
Medium
cliché-verre
Classification
Department
CG-E
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Print Purchase Fund (Rosenwald Collection)
Accession Number
1967.18.37
Art Historical Context
In the tranquil landscape of *Dreamer under Tall Trees (Le Rêveur sous les grands arbres, created by Jean-Baptiste-Camilleot in 1874, we encounter the master's late-career poetic vision. Corot, a leading figure in the Barbizon school of landscape painting and a precursor to Impressionism, captures a solitary figure lost in reverie beneath soaring trees. This evocative scene reflects his lifelong fascination with nature's quiet moods, rendered not in oil but through the innovative medium of *cliché-verre*—a rare 19th-century technique blending drawing and early photography. *Cliché-verre* invo...
About the Artist
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, born on July 16, 1796, in Paris to a prosperous bourgeois family—his father a former wig-maker turned draper and his mother a successful milliner—was initially apprenticed in the textile trade but pursued art from his mid-twenties with family support. He studied under the neoclassical landscapist Achille Etna Michallon in 1821–1822, who taught him to sketch outdoors in...