Wagon Going to Town (Le Charriot allant a la ville)
Medium
cliché-verre
Classification
Department
CG-E
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Print Purchase Fund (Rosenwald Collection)
Accession Number
1967.18.25
Art Historical Context
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Cor, a leading figure in the Barbizon school of landscape painting, captures the serene rhythm of rural French life in *Wagon Going to TownLe Charriot allant a ville)*, created in 1860. This evocative print depicts a horse-drawn wagon trundling toward a distant village, evoking quiet poetry of everyday countryside journeys. Corot, renowned for his luminous plein-air sketches and poetic realism that bridged Romanticism and Impressionism, his masterful touch to this intimate scene. The artwork's medium, cliché-verre—a rare 19th-century hybrid technique—involves drawing dir...
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...