Bords de rivière

During the last 15 years of the artist's life, affection for Corot deepened among his fellow artists and the public at large. Charles Blanc wrote in 1876, the year Corot's death, 'He is beloved like a comrade and respected like a master.' By this point in his career, Corot no longer retained his previous distinctions between the techniques he used for informal plein air sketches and imagined works painted in the studio, though he was still regularly working out of doors. Thus, the leaves in the trees of this landscape along an unidentified river are painted in the same way the artist painted the leaves of his invented trees. The foreground of the landscape and the buildings at right, however, have a solidity and a specificity that suggests they were likely directly observed by the artist. In reviews of the Salons during the last decade of Corot's life, commentators routinely remarked that small plein air studies like this one were truer reflections of the artist's talent than the more elaborate compositions he exhibited at the Salons.