Souvenir of Terracina
1864, reworked slightly later
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 66.04 × 81.28 cm (26 × 32 in.) framed: 91.76 × 107.63 × 8.57 cm (36 1/8 × 42 3/8 × 3 3/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Department
CF
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection)
Accession Number
2014.136.26
Art Historical Context
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Cor's *Souvenir of Terrac* (1864, slightly reworked later) invites visitors into the dreamy coastal vistas of Italy, a place the artist cherished from his travels in the 1820s and 1830s. This oil on canvas, measuring 26 × inches, depicts the sunlit town of Terracina south of Rome, evoking a nostalgic "souvenir" painted from memory and sketches decades later. Corot's soft, atmospheric rendering captures the play of light on sea and hills, blending precise observation with poetic reverie. A master of the Barbizon School, Corot bridged Neoclassicism and Impressionism throu...
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...