Landscape (The Large Tree) (c. 1865–70): Art, History and Details

Landscape (The Large Tree) (c. 1865–70) 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:

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot used sticks of charcoal, a powdery black medium, to dramatic effect in this late-career landscape, layering them and turning them on their side to form tonal areas and fine lines. Describing the period when the drawing was made, a colleague wrote that “one never saw [Corot] without . . . charcoal in his hand.” Such artworks conveyed the poetry the artist saw in nature and advanced his lifelong ambition of elevating landscape from the lowly status it held at the conservative French Academy. Here, he aimed to capture an evocative mood rather than a specific place, describing such works as “souvenirs,” or remembrances.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape (The Large Tree)
• Date: c. 1865–70
• Creator attribution: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: charcoal with stumping, erasing, and wet brushwork on light brown wove paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 24.2 x 41.8 cm (9 1/2 x 16 7/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.386

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• French Drawings of the XIX. Century. Exh. cat. London: Obach & Co, 1907.
• Corot: 1796-–1875, 29. Exh. cat. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1960.
• Dee, Elaine Evans. 19th- and 20th-Century European Drawings. Exh. cat. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1965.

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.