Tower at the Lake's Horizon (Tour á L'Horizon d'un Lac)
1871
Medium
Cliché-verre
Dimensions
Sheet (Trimmed): 4 1/2 × 6 5/16 in. (11.5 × 16 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1934
Accession Number
34.4.3
Tags
Art Historical Context
Camille Corot’s *Tower at the Lake’s Horizon* captures the quiet poetry of the natural world through an intimate landscape. Created in 1871, late in the artist’s career, the small print depicts a distant tower rising above a tranquil lake, framed by delicate trees. Corot, a leading figure of the Barbizon school, was celebrated for his soft, atmospheric landscapes that bridged Neoclassicism and Impressionism, emphasizing mood over precise detail. The work is executed in cliché-verre, a distinctive 19th-century technique that merges drawing and photography. The artist scratched his design into ...
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...