Corot was not able to turn to the full-time practice of art until he was 26, when he was taught by Achille Etha Michallon, who had been a pupil of Jacques-Louis David and the first to win the Prix de Rome in the Historical Landscape Category established in 1817. The influence of Michallon’s severe neo-classical compositions and cool colour was tempered by his advice to work en plein air, reproducing what he saw in front of him as scrupulously as he could. Working initially around Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau and Normandy, Corot made sketches direct from nature and finished his paintings in the studio. This was the method also used by the so-called Barbizon painters, but while his name is often associated with them (and indeed he was among the first artists to paint in that region) there is a poetic or literary quality to Corot’s finished pictures which aligns them more strongly to classical conventions than the romanticist claim for nature for its own sake.