Family Works: A Multiplicity of Meanings and Contexts | http://www.concordia.ca/familyworks

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, L'i�le heureuse, ca. 1865–68, oil on canvas, 188 x 142.5 cm, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

L'île heureuse (ca. 1865–68) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) illustrates the growing

acceptance of landscape painting as a worthy artistic practice in the second half of the nineteenth

century. Numerous artists convened in the forests of Fontainebleau to gain inspiration for their

Family Works: A Multiplicity of Meanings and Contexts | http://www.concordia.ca/familyworks

work from the living landscape. This group, which came to be known as the Barbizon school,

valued the integration of academic technique with direct observation to create landscapes full of

life. In this painting of an imagined island of peace and serenity, Corot demonstrates his

impressionistic method of capturing the remembered feeling and experience of a place without

the need for complete accuracy or technical detail. Inspired by photography, which was gaining

popularity at the time, Corot borrowed the blurred images of trees and over-exposed skies

resulting from long exposures to produce a new way of viewing the landscape. Dwarfed by the

immense trees, the woman and small child in the bottom right corner seem to become one with

the landscape: the woman's reaching arms echo the branches of the tree, while the tree becomes

anthropomorphic in the curving figure of its trunk and its face-like hollow. This piece was one of

five panels made to decorate the entrance hall of Corot's good friend and fellow artist Charles

Daubigny's (1817–1878) home, bringing the idyllic landscape into the family home as a source

of comfort.

Sydney Pine