Souvenir of Italy (Souvenir d'Italie)
Medium
etching
Classification
Department
CG-E
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Rosenwald Collection
Accession Number
1954.12.13
Art Historical Context
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a leading French landscape painter of the 19th century and a key figure in the Barb School, created *Souvenir of Italy* in 1866. This etching beautifully captures the artist's enduring love for Italy, a country he visited multiple times between 1825 and 1843. Corot's works often evoke a poetic nostalgia for sunlit landscapes, blending classical clarity with emerging Impressionist tendencies in his use of light and atmosphere. As part of the National Gallery of Art's Rosenwald Collection (Department CG-E, Print classification), it reflects his ability to distill che...
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...