1796–1875 · French landscape painter, leading figure of the Barbizon school
Camille Corot was one of the most influential French landscape painters of the 19th century, a bridge between Neoclassical tradition and the Impressionism that followed. He was famous for his silvery, dreamlike woodland scenes and for the aphorisms about imagination and memory he shared with younger painters. The saying “I dream my picture and afterwards I paint my dream” captures his method of working from remembered impression rather than literal observation — and it is his line, not van Gogh’s.