Souvenir of the Environs of Monaco (Souvenir des environs de Monaco)
Medium
cliché-verre
Classification
Department
CG-E
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Print Purchase Fund (Rosenwald Collection)
Accession Number
1967.18.24
Rights
Public Domain
Art Historical Context
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's *Souvenir of the Environs of Monaco* (1860) captures the serene beauty of the French Riviera in a rare and innovative medium: cliché-verre. This 19th-century technique involved drawing directly on a glass plate coated with light-sensitive emulsion, then printing it like a photograph. The result blends Corot's painterly touch with photographic precision, producing ethereal, painterly images that feel both spontaneous and timeless. Housed in the National Gallery of Art's Rosenwald Collection, this print exemplifies the experimental spirit of mid-century French art. ...
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...