Group of Trees (1858): Art, History and Details

Group of Trees (1858) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The purest expression of the pastoral in French landscape in the mid-19th century may be found in the work of Corot. In the cliché-verre prints that he created between 1854 and 1874, Corot took advantage of the spontaneity of this simple process. Drawing directly on a glass plate coated with collodion, and then printing it like a photographic negative, Corot developed a loose, free style of draftsmanship that was unparalleled in his painting. Prints such as these were made purely for his own pleasure and were not intended for sale. Graceful, fluid lines flow from tree to tree and from tree to land, blending into each other without interruption, suggesting a harmony uniting all of nature.

Object facts

• Title: Group of Trees
• Date: 1858
• Creator attribution: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: cliché-verre
• Dimensions: Sheet: 15.5 x 22.9 cm (6 1/8 x 9 in.)
• Collection: PR - Cliché verre
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1991.85

A detail from the museum

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot introduced the cliché-verre technique to other artists working in an artists' colony at the forest of Fontainebleau, outside Paris.

Collection credit

Seventy-fifth anniversary gift of the Broh-Kahns

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1992.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38–79.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.