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拍品专文
Painted near Gisors, Normandy, the present work is a classic example of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's landscape painting, containing all the motifs and the innate sense of light for which the artist is best known. The composition of a distant building, framed by trees, and located near a vanishing point at the end of a path or river is equally typical.
Although executed from nature, this painting presents a gently idealised view of pastoral life, consistent with the increased emphasis that Corot gave to expression and feeling over observation after around 1850. From this time, most of Corot's smaller landscapes reveal a slightly poetic quality, which places them somewhere between the lyrical and highly composed large-scale landscapes (or Souvenirs) that Corot often exhibited at the Salon in his later years, and the more rigorously realist landscapes, often architectural and devoid of people, so typical of his early career.
"After 1850, Corot's landscapes become more animated. Along roads, at junctions, in meadows and along rivers a whole people live their modest lives. These are humble village folk, tied to the landscapes to which they are indigenous; they seem to be the rustic incarnation of those creatures and nymphs which fill Corot's "noble" paintings of this period. They travel in carts and on horseback, or simply idle by. By a pond or a river, a fisherman dreams...children keep cattle or play truant. Human toil is for Corot to be kept at arm's length, and the nature that he paints is a kind of Golden Age, where man lives, without too much effort, from the fruits of the field or the milk of his livestock." (G. Bazin, Corot, Paris, 1942, p. 55).
Although executed from nature, this painting presents a gently idealised view of pastoral life, consistent with the increased emphasis that Corot gave to expression and feeling over observation after around 1850. From this time, most of Corot's smaller landscapes reveal a slightly poetic quality, which places them somewhere between the lyrical and highly composed large-scale landscapes (or Souvenirs) that Corot often exhibited at the Salon in his later years, and the more rigorously realist landscapes, often architectural and devoid of people, so typical of his early career.
"After 1850, Corot's landscapes become more animated. Along roads, at junctions, in meadows and along rivers a whole people live their modest lives. These are humble village folk, tied to the landscapes to which they are indigenous; they seem to be the rustic incarnation of those creatures and nymphs which fill Corot's "noble" paintings of this period. They travel in carts and on horseback, or simply idle by. By a pond or a river, a fisherman dreams...children keep cattle or play truant. Human toil is for Corot to be kept at arm's length, and the nature that he paints is a kind of Golden Age, where man lives, without too much effort, from the fruits of the field or the milk of his livestock." (G. Bazin, Corot, Paris, 1942, p. 55).