Jeune femme étendue sur l’herbe

Known primarily for his influential form of landscape painting, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was also a prolific figurative painter, as evidenced by Jeune femme étendue sur l’herbe (‘Young woman lying on the grass’), which was painted circa 1850-1860. Indeed, while Corot’s form of en plein air landscape painting would become a seminal influence for the nascent group of young artists whom became known as the Impressionists, it was his figure painting that served as an important inspiration for Degas, as well as for the Post-Impressionists, Cézanne and Van Gogh, and later, for Juan Gris and Picasso. Corot himself regarded the nude as one of the most important genres of art, believing that it was a practice essential to the pursuit of naturalism in all forms. As he told his students later in life: ‘The study of the nude…is the best lesson that a landscape painter can have. If someone knows how, without any tricks, to get down a figure, he is able to make a landscape; otherwise he can never do it’ (Corot, quoted in G. Tinterow, M. Pantazzi & V. Pomarède, Corot, exh. cat., Paris, Ottowa & New York, 1996-1997, p. 164).

Jeune femme étendue sur l’herbe is a rare example of the reclining nude in Corot’s art. Here, a nude figure lies languorously amidst a verdant green landscape. While most of Corot’s nude figures were placed within a mythological or allegorical context, this sense of narrative is absent in Jeune femme étendue sur l’herbe. Indeed, any precise details of the setting are also absent, as she appears framed amidst an almost abstract, flattened screen of green tones. Her elongated horizontal pose is typical of the artist’s nude figures, and immediately calls to mind the idealised odalisques of Ingres. Her complex, twisted pose reflects Corot’s interest in anatomy, while the dense application of richly opaque oil paint to depict her body is reminiscent of the figure painting of Corot’s contemporary, Gustave Courbet.