Avignon from the West, by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Avignon from the West (c. 1836) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Oil on canvas.
Source Wikimedia Commons

The countryside excursions Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot took under

the blue skies of Italy and Provence resulted in some of the most
delicate and beautiful paintings of his career. Oil-paint sketches of
ancient aqueducts and crumbling temples have the quality of
effortlessly painted postcards. Avignon from the West was made in
around 1836, when the artist was about 40 years old.

At this stage in his career, Corot had long-since adopted a practice of

travelling and painting outdoors during the summer months, making
studies and sketches directly from nature, and then using these as the
basis for larger, more finished pieces during the winter. The paintings
he made were to be hugely influential for later generations of artists,
and remain so, thanks to their faithfulness to natural light and
sincerity of purpose, an approach that resisted the nostalgic stylisation
of Neo-classical French art.

In this painting, the simple naturalism of the sunlight that falls across
the landscape has for me the quality of a pure lived experience. It is —
in my estimation — impossible to invent a scene like this, with that
purity of colour and delicacy of light. I went to Avignon in the south of
France once and walked its streets and took photographs. It moves me
to think that the artist went there too, canvas and paint brushes in
hand, to capture his own experience in the early part of the 19th
century.

These are the elements that echo in the memory, forgotten scenes that
spring up with the stir of diverse passions and spirits. Those times
when we first learnt and felt and unfolded, senses awake. Artists
capture these moments and prove that we all share in a common
experience.