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Lot Essay
Corot visited Italy for the first time in 1825 at the age of only 29. He returned to Italy in 1834 for six months and made his final trip to Rome in 1843 when he revisited many of the sites he had first painted nine years before. The Italian trips are crucial since it was here that he developed his acute appreciation of light effects and began to infuse his landscapes with the glowing luminosity which is a trademark of many of his greatest paintings.
His days on the Italian lakes also stimulated his tendency to concentrate on a mood, rather than on the precise observation of reality. Thus the fact that Corot had chosen to entitle this work 'souvenir' is not without significance as the emphasis is now placed on the evocation of a time remembered. Charles Perrier observed that "Corot borrows from nature only its effects and, so to speak, the moral impression the view makes on us. Thus the painter himself only rarely gives his paintings the name 'landscape'. He calls them 'impression of morning', 'twilight', 'an evening', 'remembrance', all things that bear no relation to the conscientious reproduction of material objects. What he is aiming for is not the tangible form but the idea ..." (quoted in exh. cat., Corot, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1996, p. 236).
Souvenir de la Villa Borghese was painted at the peak of Corot's career. The Exposition Universelle of 1855 had earned Corot a first class medal and his reputation was growing steadily. He also began to enjoy the official patronage of the state, his painting Souvenir de Marcoussis (Muse du Louvre, Paris) being purchased by Napoleon III for his private collection. It was during this period that Corot came to be recognised as the greatest French landscape painter by critics such as Philippe de Chennevires who called him a 'poet of the landscape'.
His days on the Italian lakes also stimulated his tendency to concentrate on a mood, rather than on the precise observation of reality. Thus the fact that Corot had chosen to entitle this work 'souvenir' is not without significance as the emphasis is now placed on the evocation of a time remembered. Charles Perrier observed that "Corot borrows from nature only its effects and, so to speak, the moral impression the view makes on us. Thus the painter himself only rarely gives his paintings the name 'landscape'. He calls them 'impression of morning', 'twilight', 'an evening', 'remembrance', all things that bear no relation to the conscientious reproduction of material objects. What he is aiming for is not the tangible form but the idea ..." (quoted in exh. cat., Corot, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1996, p. 236).
Souvenir de la Villa Borghese was painted at the peak of Corot's career. The Exposition Universelle of 1855 had earned Corot a first class medal and his reputation was growing steadily. He also began to enjoy the official patronage of the state, his painting Souvenir de Marcoussis (Muse du Louvre, Paris) being purchased by Napoleon III for his private collection. It was during this period that Corot came to be recognised as the greatest French landscape painter by critics such as Philippe de Chennevires who called him a 'poet of the landscape'.