The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (116 page)

(
c.
1470–1533).
Netherlandish painter and designer. Born in Oostsanen, he worked mainly in nearby Amsterdam, where he was the leading designer of
woodcuts
, liberating the Dutch woodcut from the
miniature
tradition and giving it a new power and breadth. Comparatively few of his works have been preserved: among the woodcuts is a series illustrating the
Passion
(1512–17) and among the paintings are a
Self-portrait
(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1533) and an
Adoration of the Shepherds
(Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, 1512) which contains pudgy angels playing toy-like instruments, singing, and decorating with garlands an improbable
Renaissance
manger. Although his work is somewhat provincial, he marks the beginning of the great artistic tradition of Amsterdam, and his keenness of observation was to be one of the trademarks of later Dutch art. Jan van
Scorel
was his most important pupil.

 
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(1783–1867).
German painter, best known for the major part he played in the revival of
fresco
in the 19th cent. After training at the Düsseldorf Academy Cornelius moved to Italy in 1811 and joined the
Nazarenes
in Rome. In 1819 he was called to Munich by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (later Ludwig I), for whom he worked extensively, notably on a series of frescos in the Ludwigskirche (1836–9), including a
Last Judgement
that is larger than
Michelangelo's
in the Sistine Chapel. When this work was not well received Cornelius left Munich to work for Frederick William IV of Prussia in Berlin. His major undertaking there was a commission for frescos in a mausoleum for the royal family. The project was officially cancelled after the revolution in 1848, but Cornelius continued to work on his drawings for it for the rest of his life. Cornelius's work is undoubtedly impressive, but rather self-conscious in its desire to revive the heroic pictorial language of
Raphael
and Michelangelo, and combine it with the didactic philosophy of German
Romanticism
. He was director of the academies at Düsseldorf and Munich and his influence was considerable; it may well be claimed that his works in Munich sparked off the revival of large-scale fresco decoration in Germany and perhaps elsewhere. His advice was sought when frescos were painted in the Houses of Parliament, London in the 1840s.

 
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(1903–72).
American sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of
assemblage
. He had no formal training in art and his most characteristic works are his highly distinctive ‘boxes’. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac in a way that has been said to combine the formal austerity of
Constructivism
with the lively fantasy of
Surrealism
. Like Kurt
Schwitters
he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying for his appeal on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted and made Surrealist films.

 
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(1796–1875).
French painter. At the age of 26 he abandoned a commercial career for art, and from the first showed a strong vocation for landscape painting. He lived in Paris, but travelled about France making sketches from nature and from these he composed in his studio. In addition to his journeys in France, he visited England, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Italy three times (1825–8, 1834, and 1843). Throughout his life Corot found congenial the advice given to him by his teacher Achille-Etna
Michallon
‘to reproduce as scrupulously as possible what I saw in front of me’. On the other hand he never felt entirely at home with the ideals of the
Barbizon School
, the members of which saw
Romantic
idealization of the countryside as a form of escapism from urban banality, and he remained more faithful to the French
classical
tradition than to the English or Dutch schools. Yet although he continued to make studied compositions after his sketches done direct from nature, he brought a new and personal poetry into the classical tradition of composed landscape and an unaffected naturalness which had hitherto been foreign to it. Though he represented nature realistically, he did not idealize the peasant or the labours of agriculture in the manner of
Millet
and
Courbet
, and he was uninvolved in ideological controversy.
From 1827 Corot exhibited regularly at the
Salon
, but his greatest success there came with a rather different type of picture—more traditionally Romantic in its evocation of an Arcadian past, and painted in a misty soft-edged style that contrasts sharply with the luminous clarity of his more topographical work. Late in his career Corot also turned to figure painting and it is only fairly recently that this aspect of his work has emerged from neglect—his female nudes are often of high quality. It was, however, his directness of vision that was generally admired by the major landscape painters of the latter half of the century and influenced nearly all of them at some stage in their careers. His popularity was (and is) such that he is said to be the most forged of all painters (this in addition to an already prolific output). In his lifetime he was held in great esteem as a man as well as an artist, for he had a noble and generous nature; he supported Millet's widow, for example, and gave a cottage to the blind and impoverished
Daumier
.

 
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