The Saint-Paterne Tower in Orléans

This view of the Orléans rooftops, probably taken from a room in the rue du Pot-de-Fer looking towards the Tour Saint-Paterne, destroyed in 1914, shows Camille Corot's role in the development of plein-air painting. Encouraged by his first master, Achille-Etna Michallon, to go outdoors to paint from nature, he learned to work from the motif and then to create composed landscapes in the studio, completing his classical training in the studio of Jean-Victor Bertin, a master of neoclassical landscape painting and following the theories of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes.

This sketch, preparatory to the painting in the Musée de Strasbourg, was made on the artist's return from his first trip to Italy, between 1825 and 1828, at his own expense. Following in Michallon's footsteps, he increased the number of plein-air sessions, painting Roman rooftops with the kind of volume construction that he preserves in this study. On his return, he traveled throughout France, and it was no doubt after a visit to Chartres in 1830 that he extended his journey to Orléans. In this geometrically precise depiction of the city's rooftops, the two vertical masses of the tower and the swiftly brushed, misty foliage break with the horizontality of the roofs and sky.

Combining the realism of an on-the-spot shot with a very classical layout, this view shows the artist's talent for evoking atmosphere and the transparency of air.

Later a frequent visitor to Barbizon, the meeting place of the new landscape school, Corot was considered during his lifetime to be the greatest landscape painter of his time and a pioneer, thanks to his exceptional experience of the outdoors and his obvious interest in simple, realistic nature. Yet he never sought to challenge the classical landscape, painting historical landscapes all his life and devoting much of his time to creative work in the studio.