Landscape with Pollard Willows
1840 - 1875
Medium
oil on panel
Dimensions
30.5; 9.5; 40
About this artwork
A. van Wezel Bequest, Amsterdam
Art Historical Context
Step into the peaceful countryside captured in *Landscape with Pollard Willows* by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Cor, a master of 19th-century French landscape. Created sometime between 1840 and1875, this intimate oil on panel (40 × 30.5 cm) depicts pollard willows—trees deliberately pruned into distinctive, knobby shapes for practical use in rural Europe. Corot's soft, diffused light and subtle tonal harmonies evoke a quiet, poetic atmosphere, hallmarks of his style that bridged Romanticism and the emerging Realism of the Barbizon School. Corot, often called the "poet of light," pioneered plein-air ...
About the Artist
Camille Corot · 1796–1875
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, born in Paris on July 16, 1796, into a prosperous bourgeois family—his father a former wig maker turned draper, his mother a successful milliner—initially resisted his artistic calling. After a lackluster education at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen and failed apprenticeships in business, he abandoned commerce at age 26, thanks to a generous parental allowance foll...