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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
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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