The following was written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, art researcher from Laguna Woods, California:

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796 in a house on a corner that looked out on the bridges that loop the Seine. His father ran a fashionable millinery shop. He was twenty-six years old when he entered the studio of landscape painter Achille-Etna Michallon, an artist no older than himself who encouraged him to work en plein air. Michallon died only a few months later, leaving Corot to continue his training with the much older artist Jean-Victor Bertin (who had been Michallon's teacher).

After his schooling, Camille was apprenticed to a draper He was sweet and kind but he was also stubb...