Memory in Landscape: (Jean Baptiste Camille) Corot at the National Gallery‪.‬

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot had a reputation as a genuinely happy man -- happy when poor, happy when rich, content to labour as an unknown artist, delighted when his work finally received widespread recognition. But there were deeper and more disturbing emotions behind the visions of a painter who came to detest the sight of his own face. Much of the awe-inspiring beauty he created on canvas was drawn from the deepest recesses of his mind, a mind he had trained to trap the fleeting images of the natural world. Once these vistas were committed to memory, there was no limit to what could be achieved by one of the great artistic visionaries of all time. ON 11 July 1872, Corot celebrated at Saint-Nicolas-lez-Arras his jubilee of fifty years as a painter, an event hosted by two younger friends, Charles Desavary and Alfred Robaut. Two days later, the artist and Robaut left for Rouen. Somewhat unexpectedly, rather than painting, Corot took a few days off to visit with Robaut the sites of his earliest memories as a boy. He went to the Palais de Justice to look at the Gothic Hall which had inspired Eugene Delacroix's Interior of a Dominican Convent; remembering the painting, he was overheard to cry out: "What a man! What a man!" He also visited the museum, admired the churches, and before leaving he went to the old lycee where he had studied a good sixty years earlier. The building was empty, but Corot showed Robaut the spot where he had been punished as a boy, forced to stand facing the wall. Eventually, the old man drifted to the classroom where he had been taught algebra. Standing before the blackboard, Corot picked up a piece of chalk and drew a flower. Then, as an after-thought, he inscribed his initials, two C's drawn back to back. The unique initials looked rather like an X, and considering the massive task Robaut would soon undertake, this symbol of the unknown quantity was appropriate indeed. For years afterwards Robaut was to regret that he did not press the sleeve of his dark coat against that blackboard and take an imprint of Corot's chalk sketch. What he proposed to do with his sleeve, had the deed been done, was never revealed, but such are the retrospective regrets of biographers.