La Cervara, the Roman Campagna (c. 1830–31): Art, History and Details

La Cervara, the Roman Campagna (c. 1830–31) 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:

Corot based his large oil painting on drawings and oil sketches made outdoors. Attracted to the beauty of the Italian countryside, he often sketched around Rome, where he lived from 1825 to 1828. This painting's highly structured composition, based on forms moving into the distance along a series of diagonals, is characteristic of Corot's early style and recalls the classical landscapes of 17th-century painter Nicholas Poussin.

Object facts

• Title: La Cervara, the Roman Campagna
• Date: c. 1830–31
• Creator attribution: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 130 x 167.5 x 9.5 cm (51 3/16 x 65 15/16 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 97.6 x 135.8 cm (38 7/16 x 53 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1963.91

A detail from the museum

In 1845, the French poet Charles Baudelaire proclaimed Corot the leading painter of the modern landscape.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Interpretations: Sixty-Five Works from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1991.
• Robaut, Alfred, and Etienne Moreau-Nélaton. L'Œuvre de Corot. Paris, France: H. Floury, 1905.
• Moreau-Nélaton, Etienne. Corot raconté par lui-même. Paris, France: Henri Laurens, Éditeur, 1924.

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.