Caleb De Jong reviews the exhibition Unknown Corot: Unpublished Drawings at Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York, on view through July 20, 2012.

De Jong writes: "Mostly landscapes with lone figures scattered throughout provincial French environs, Corot's drawing moved from David's neo-classicism to later washy painterly charcoal drawings that pre-date Frank Auerbach's drawings of Primrose Hill a century later. Beginning with a pristine if slightly stilted early style, Corot by the end of his life was rendering the visual equivalent of full scale oil paintings but made with only a stick of willow charcoal on a piece of paper a palm high and across."