Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The Wood Gatherer

This landscape is one of a number painted by Corot in his later years, which combine a foreground of trees and figures, a lake or sea at the right, and in the left background sunlit buildings descending a hillside. These pictures are often reminiscent of the towns and cities of Italy he had seen during his three visits to the country in 1825–8, 1834 and 1843. While the houses in this view have been left vague in outline, those in a painting such as Souvenir of Castel Gandolfo (about 1865, Louvre, Paris) are more prominent and include a distinctive domed church. As the title ‘souvenir’ suggests, they are evocations of places visited over the artist’s life. Corot sometimes interwove elements from different locations in his work, juxtaposing views of such places as the lake at Ville-d’Avray with features of the Italian landscape, using earlier paintings or drawings as reference points, as in The Leaning Tree Trunk.

In the foreground here the figure gathering wood, possibly a woman, has an orange hat, a typical bright accent that Corot would introduce into his landscapes. The same colour, probably cadmium orange, has been used to pick out flowers in the grass. Also characteristic of Corot’s technique is his treatment of the sky, which he painted at a late stage. Around the trees at the left he has added light blue sky paint round over the foliage, and then painted further leaves and branches on top. He also brought the sky over the buildings, with the roof of the house visible between the two trees almost totally obscured by paint.