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
Rights
Public Domain
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 through his innovative plein-air studies refined in the studio. His fluid brushwork and subtle tonal harmonies create a sense of timeless serenity, influencing later generations. Housed in the National Gallery of Art as part of the Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection), this painting exemplifies Corot's enduring legacy in landscape art, offering a window into 19th-century Romanticism's embrace of nature's quiet beauty.
About the Artist
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot · 1796–1875
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...