Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Souvenir of a Journey to Coubron

The marshy pond in the left foreground blends into land rising to a small hill on the right, where two buildings are nestled behind a row of tall trees. Coubron, which lies to the east of Paris, was the home of Corot’s friends the Gratiots, and he made the first of many visits there in 1867. By the early 1870s Corot was a successful and sought-after artist, and in 1872, seeking the peace and quiet which it was no longer possible to have in Paris, he decided to have a small studio built adjoining their house, which was unveiled on 15 April 1873. It was at this time that the idea for this view came to him, but he actually painted it in May, after a small sketch, while he was staying in Ville-d’Avray.

It was not unusual for Corot to paint landscapes in the studio in this way, particularly during his later years, and many of his ‘souvenirs’ are memories of places of special importance which he had visited over his life. It does not mean, however, that everything in these landscapes was necessarily true to what he had originally observed, and he would often draw on a stock of images to construct a composition. The houses, for example, with their distinctive gable ends appear in a number of his late paintings. A very similar grouping of a taller house flanked by a lower one stands in the background of Pulling in the Fishing Nets of 1871 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and a more complex cluster appears in the background of A Flood, also an evocation of a watery landscape.

The handling is typical of Corot’s late style. While the sky is quite substantially painted, the landscape has an extremely thin first layer in grey-green, with the texture of the canvas showing throughout. The trunks of the trees are also very thinly painted and the foliage has been rendered with a mass of horizontal strokes in milky greys and greens, creating the shimmering surface which is so characteristic of his mature work.