Hermann David Salomon Corrodi

Hermann David Salomon Corrodi was born on 23 July 1844 in Frascati, Italy, into a Swiss family of painters and printmakers who had settled and worked in Italy. His father, Salomon Corrodi (1810 to 1892), was his first teacher and later trained him at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome; one auction-catalog source also places him earlier in Alexandre Calame's studio in Geneva, from about 1860, though this detail is not corroborated elsewhere. Corrodi went on to study further in Paris around 1872. His brother, Arnold Corrodi, was also a painter.

Corrodi worked mainly from Rome. He traveled repeatedly to Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, and Constantinople, and these journeys supplied the desert, harbor, and ruin subjects that became his signature. He was a personal acquaintance of Queen Victoria and received commissions for history paintings from the British royal family. In 1893 the Accademia di San Luca knighted him Accademico di Merito, recognizing his standing as a professor at the academy. He died in Rome on 30 January 1905.

Corrodi was recognized in his own lifetime through official and social channels rather than a body of independent art criticism: acceptance among royal patrons, including Queen Victoria, and a knighthood as Accademico di Merito from the Accademia di San Luca in 1893. Auction house catalogue writing, including from Christie's and Galerie Aryjan, consistently praises his handling of light, atmosphere, and architectural and archaeological detail drawn from his travels in Egypt and the Ottoman world. No verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is quoted here.

The highest price documented for Corrodi in accessible auction records is USD 19,100, paid at Christie's for On the banks of the Nile on 14 December 2023, per the market tracker HENI. Public auction databases, including Invaluable, ArtValue, and Heritage Auctions, do not offer a single reconciled worldwide ranking of his sales, so this figure should be read as the best-documented result rather than a certified all-time record. Outside that result, his works trade steadily but modestly, with reported prices including USD 14,062.50 at Heritage Auctions and C$8,400 per ArtValue's Canadian record, placing most of his market in the low five figures or below. There is no gallery or estate that currently represents him; his market runs through the secondary auction circuit and aggregator platforms such as Artnet and Invaluable.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Corrodi, so authentication rests on signature, provenance, and the collective judgment of the major auction houses that regularly bring his work to sale. His market is thin and episodic: most documented results sit in the low five figures or below, and the USD 19,100 Christie's sale of On the banks of the Nile in 2023 is the highest price identified in accessible sources, though it should not be treated as a definitively certified worldwide record. His presence in institutional collections, most notably the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York, offers a useful anchor for provenance and quality comparisons, but collectors should expect to work through specialist auction houses rather than a gallery or estate when buying or selling.