Jean-Baptiste Corot, a contemporary of Eugène Delacroix, is a quiet romantic painter who is often overlooked. Similar to the pairing of Rembrandt and Vermeer, the world's attention was captured by the dramatic and the colorful. Vermeer and Corot are the masters of quiet moments. Their palettes are drained of vivid colors. Yellow, brown and light-blue predominate in Corot's work. When, for once, he uses a bright red such as in his Reading Girl, the effect is spectacular, vivid. Another peculiarity is that his (female) models almost never make eye contact. Even if they look towards the spectator, their eyes focus slightly above the viewer's face, thus refusing to engage. Corot truly is a 19th century Vermeer, with the possible exception that Corot is also a great and productive landscape painter. The only defect of this marvelously illustrated introduction is the low number of landscape paintings included.

As last year's wonderful exhibition "Corot in Switzerland" in Geneva has shown, his landscape output dwarfs the number of portraits. Compared to his contemporaries, Corot was surprisingly modern and light, which may explain some of his recent popularity, at least among those interested in art. ( )