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Lot Essay
In his review of the 1870 Salon, the critic Georges Lafenestre described Corot as "the patriarch of landscape painters" (exh. cat., Corot, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1996, p. 259). Long after his critical success of the 1850s, Corot's work was now being praised by a younger generation of artists who turned increasingly to landscape painting as means of freeing themselves from academic convention and establishing a more direct relationship to "nature" and to the "motif". Among the younger generation of painters, Berthe Morisot sought Corot's instruction and Pissarro, in the Salon brochures, described himself, out of respect, as a pupil of the elder artist. Critics, including Emile Zola, Thodore Duret, and Edmond Duranty, associated Corot with the new school of painting, regularly referring to him as the precursor of Impressionism. During the 1860s, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley had all, in one way or another, experimented with Corot's painterly techniques.
Corot exhibited six works in the 1855 Exposition Universelle, including Souvenir de Marcoussis, prs de Monthlry (Muse d'Orsay, Paris), which was immediately purchased by Napoleon III. Corot was awarded a first-class medal for his paintings and almost all the critics, and notably the emperor, found much to admire in his art.
The present work, was also painted in Marcoussis. According to Moreau-Nlaton, Corot made annual trips to Marcoussis, southwest of Paris in the old department of Seine-et-Oise, to visit a former pupil, the painter Ernest-Joachim Dumax. "The food was good, the conversation casual, and there was an abundance of pretty motifs." (quoted in exh. cat., Corot, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994, p. 354).
Corot exhibited six works in the 1855 Exposition Universelle, including Souvenir de Marcoussis, prs de Monthlry (Muse d'Orsay, Paris), which was immediately purchased by Napoleon III. Corot was awarded a first-class medal for his paintings and almost all the critics, and notably the emperor, found much to admire in his art.
The present work, was also painted in Marcoussis. According to Moreau-Nlaton, Corot made annual trips to Marcoussis, southwest of Paris in the old department of Seine-et-Oise, to visit a former pupil, the painter Ernest-Joachim Dumax. "The food was good, the conversation casual, and there was an abundance of pretty motifs." (quoted in exh. cat., Corot, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994, p. 354).