Some dates in history accumulate meaning the way paint accumulates on a canvas — layer by layer, century by century. February 22 is one of them. In the story of the nude in art, this single day touches a French Romantic master’s final chapter, the institutional birth of academic figure study, and an American dynasty that bridged two continents and two centuries of portraiture. None of these men knew they shared a date. But together, they tell us something about how the painted human body moves through time.
February 22, 1875: The Day Corot’s Brush Fell Silent
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot died on this date in 1875, at the age of seventy-eight, having spent more than fifty years making paintings that almost nobody could categorize. His early landscapes were too loose for the Neoclassicists. His later figure paintings were too classical for the Impressionists. He was, in the most generous sense, unclassifiable — which is exactly why he mattered.
Most people know Corot from his misty, silvery landscapes: trembling poplars, still ponds, light that seems to arrive from somewhere just outside the frame. What fewer people discuss is what Corot was doing in his studio during those same years. Beginning in the 1850s and accelerating in the 1860s and 1870s, he produced a series of figure paintings — bacchantes, nymphs, women reading, women dreaming — that represent one of the most underappreciated bodies of nude work in nineteenth-century French art.
The bacchantes were particular obsessions. Corot painted them again and again: solitary figures, usually female, posed against the kinds of landscapes he’d spent a lifetime mastering. They are not the triumphant nudes of Rubens or the studied ideals of Ingres. They are quieter than that — contemplative, autonomous, unapologetically physical. In Bacchante by the Sea (1865), now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a young woman sits naked on rocky ground, the sea behind her, her attention entirely inward. There’s nothing to explain her presence. She doesn’t need explaining. She simply is.
Corot’s approach to the nude was ahead of its time in one crucial respect: his figures don’t perform for the viewer. They exist in their own worlds, and we’re permitted — not invited — to look. It’s a distinction that wouldn’t be theorized until much later, but Corot was practicing it in his seventies. For an artist who’d spent decades painting trees, the human figure gave him something even more interesting: interiority.
He died wealthy, having given generously to fellow artists throughout his life — including a house he purchased for Honoré Daumier when the satirist went blind. His will reportedly contained bequests to more than a dozen artists and institutions. For Corot, art was a community, not a competition. He left behind more than three thousand works. February 22, 1875 was the last of them.
February 22, 1690: The Death of the Man Who Made the Nude Compulsory
One hundred and eighty-five years before Corot drew his last breath, another French artist died on this same date: Charles Le Brun, court painter to Louis XIV and the founding director of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture — the institution that, for two centuries, would define what art was and how it should be made.
Le Brun himself was a grandiosely talented painter of historical and religious subjects, and a ferociously effective bureaucrat. He understood that art was power, and that controlling art meant controlling aesthetics, taste, and ultimately culture. Under his direction, the French Royal Academy established the curriculum that every serious European painter would follow for the next two hundred years. Drawing from the live nude model — first plaster casts, then actual human figures — was not optional. It was the foundation.
This matters more than it might appear. Before the Academy formalized nude study, access to the human figure was uneven, secretive, and largely informal. Artists trained by apprenticeship, which meant that knowledge of anatomy and the living body depended on who you happened to work for. The Academy changed all that: it institutionalized the nude as the core of artistic education, creating standardized life drawing sessions, a hierarchy of genres with the nu académique at its center, and a culture in which mastery of the human form was the prerequisite for everything else.
The irony, of course, is that this same institutional framework would later calcify into the very thing it was meant to transcend. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Academy’s reverence for the classical nude had become a straitjacket — one that Manet, Courbet, and eventually the Impressionists had to smash in order to breathe. But you can’t understand the rebellion without understanding what was being rebelled against. And Le Brun built it.
He died on February 22, 1690, having held more or less total control of French artistic life for three decades. His legacy is a peculiar one: he made the nude essential to Western art education, and in doing so, made it both sacred and suffocating. Art has spent the centuries since trying to find its way back to something honest.
February 22, 1778 and 1827: A Dynasty, Divided by Exactly Forty-Nine Years
Here is the kind of coincidence that would feel contrived if someone put it in a novel: on February 22, 1778, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Rembrandt Peale was born. On February 22, 1827 — exactly forty-nine years later, to the day — his father, Charles Willson Peale, died.
The Peale family is one of the most extraordinary dynasties in American art history. Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) was a polymath in the fullest Enlightenment sense: painter, naturalist, soldier, museum founder, inventor, and the father of seventeen children, most of whom he named after famous European artists. There was Rembrandt Peale. And Rubens Peale. And Raphaelle Peale. And Titian Peale. And Angelica Kauffmann Peale. The names were not affectations; they were intentions. Charles Willson Peale believed that art was civilization’s highest achievement, and he wanted his children to carry its history in their names.
His son Rembrandt — born on this day in 1778 — became one of the most accomplished portraitists of the early American republic. He studied in London and Paris, absorbed the influence of French Neoclassicism, and returned to America to paint presidents, generals, and the faces of a new nation. His portraits of George Washington are among the most important historical documents of the Federal period. What distinguished Rembrandt from his father and siblings was his Continental polish: he understood the body as a European academician would, had seen the great nude paintings in Parisian collections, and brought that sensibility to an America that was only beginning to take its own visual culture seriously.
Charles Willson Peale, who died on the same date his son had been born, spent his final years running the Peale Museum in Philadelphia — arguably the first natural history museum in America — and continuing to paint into his mid-eighties. His death, on February 22, 1827, marked the passing of a founding generation. His son Rembrandt would outlive him by another thirty-three years.
The coincidence of dates is, in the end, just a coincidence. But it invites a question worth sitting with: what does it mean to inherit a vocation? The Peales didn’t just pass down names and technique. They passed down a belief — urgent, almost religious — that making pictures of human beings was among the most meaningful things a person could do. Father and son, born and died on the same February day, separated by half a century and an ocean of change. The thread between them was the human face.
What a Single Date Can Hold
Three stories. Three artists. Nearly two centuries of art history compressed into a single calendar date. Le Brun made the nude the official language of Western art education in 1690. Rembrandt Peale was born into that tradition in 1778. Corot, dying in 1875, was in the process of quietly transforming it — loosening it from its academic moorings, returning it to something more intimate and less prescribed.
The through-line in all of it is the human body: how to represent it, what it means, who gets to decide. These questions didn’t begin with Le Brun’s Academy, and they didn’t end with Corot’s bacchantes. They are still very much alive — in art schools, in museum curation decisions, in the ongoing argument about what social media platforms will and won’t allow. The body has always been contested territory. The artists who matter are the ones who kept painting it anyway.
If that history resonates with you — if you believe the nude in art deserves serious, thoughtful, respectful venues — then NALA exists for exactly that reason. We’re building a community in Los Angeles that takes this tradition as seriously as any of the artists above. Get involved →
Image: Camille Corot, Bacchante by the Sea, 1865. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Campbell, 1886. Public domain (CC0).