JEAN BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT (Paris 1796 – Paris 1875)
Invitation du Salon de 1864. Souvenir de Mortefontaine
Signed, inscribed and dated March 17,1864 : D’après votre désir Je vous fait remettre Le Croquis d’un Tableau (Souvenir de morte - fontaine) que j’envois cette année au Salon. Ce 17 mars 1864, C Corot (according to your request I am sending you The Sketch of a Painting [Souvenir of morte – fontaine] that I am sending This year to the Salon. This March 17 1864, C Corot)
Ink on paper
230 x 305 mm.
PROVENANCE
Anonymous sale, Christie’s, London, July 9, 1963, lot 100, where purchased by
Rogers (an alias used by Mortimer Brandt as at the time purchaser’s names were published)
Mortimer Brandt, New York, 1963 until 1993 and thus by descent in the family to
Private collection, Baltimore until the present time
EXHIBITED
Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Fine Art, Old Master Drawings from a Private Collection, June 17 – September 7, 1986 (lent by Mortimer Brandt)
This drawing reproduces the painting that Corot sent to the 1864 Salon in Paris. The artist did 10 similar drawings of varying sizes as invitations to the Salon for his friends. The painting as well as one of the other invitations are in the collection of the Louvre.
Alfred Robaut, author of the 1905 catalogue raisonné on Corot, wrote of these invitations “with its firmness and the simplicity of its execution in forty strokes of the pen, this sketch by the master allows us to understand better the eloquence of this lovely composition. This is something apart from the painting itself, it’s the poetry of it, if I my say so.”[1]
Mortimer Brandt was a leading dealer in Old Master paintings and drawings. He was based in New York from 1937 - 1969, and afterwards moved to London.
[1] Gary Tinterow, “Le Père Corot: The Very Poet of Landscape” in Corot, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1996, p. 302.