IN COROT COUNTRY

Camille Corot, the 19th century's master of landscape art, will be the subject of a stellar 150-work show at New York's Metropolitan Mutropolitan Museum of Art this fall. HENRY PORTER identifies the strength of Corot's genius

Two hundred yeaj;s after 'Jed'n-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) was bom in the Paris of the French Revolution, his reputation stends higher than ever. In this modest man of few original opinions and still less innovatory zeal, we find a giant of landscape art and a master of figurative candor.

A quality of truth, radiates from the 150 works to be displayed in the Tisch Galleries of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 29 through Januqry 19. Corot's first.objective was always to respond to the subject before him, not to comply with the competing dagmas of Romanticism and Realism, which obsessed gus age. In 50 years ears of professional life, much of it supported by independent means, he produced bn enormous body of work. During a three year stay in Italy, for instance, he completed on average a painting a week, many of them quiet masterpieces that would be recognised only near the end of his life. As Renoir said, "There you have the great genius of the century, the greatest landscape artist that ever lived."

Corot's pictures are the work of a reserved man, but as one comes to know him, it is difficult to overlook his gifts of discretion and detail—the way light falls on a stand of birch-trees, clips a ruin at sunset, or plays on the face of his model. Sometimes the moisture that hangs in the air in these landscapes is cool and inviting enough to cause the viewer to reach handkechief. These are paintings that you'd die to live with.