Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

M. Camus, Arras (purchased from the artist in 1865)
Docteur Dieulafoy (probably Paul Georges Dieulafoy (1839-1911))
Baron Napoléon Gourgaud (1881-1944; French art collector and patron of the arts)
Paul Rosenberg (by 1942. French art dealer and one of the greatest champions of modern art, Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959) opened his gallery on Rue La Boetie, Paris, in 1911 and moved to New York in 1940)
Galerie Alfred Daber, Paris
Private collection, the Netherlands (acquired from the above in 1957)
Private collection, Paris (sale: Bonhams, London, 21 January 2015, lot 18)

Providence, Rhode Island, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, French Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries, 1942, no. 17
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Corot, 1946, no. 41, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Corot, 1947, no. 7
New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Loan exhibition of paintings by J.B.C. Corot (1796-1875), 1956, no. 23, illustrated in the catalogue
Paris, Galerie Alfred Daber, Plaisir de la Peinture, 1957, no. 6 (with incorrect dimensions) 

Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre de Corot, Paris, 1905, p. 16 (cited in comparison with no. 1286, Le Chemin de Méry, près La Ferté-sous-Jouarre)
Martin Dieterle & Claire Lebeau, Corot, sixième supplément, Paris, 2018, p. 92, no. 92, catalogued & illustrated; p. 135, illustrated

The canvas has not been lined and is securely attached to a keyed wooden stretcher. Ultra-violet light reveals some pin-head sized spots of cosmetic retouching notably in the greenery in the lower left corner and in the sky, and some minor and finely applied lines along the profile of the houses in the upper right quadrant. Otherwise, this work is in very good condition and ready to hang. Presented in a decorative gilt frame.
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Painted circa 1864-65. Roads and paths are recurring motifs in Corot's work, and from his youth the artist appears to have been particularly fond of lanes that ascend and descend. In contrast to the increasing number of souvenirs Corot painted in the 1860s - silvery poetic reminiscences of a particular place distilled into a picture - the present work is very much set in time and place and, if not painted in the open air, at least based on a plein air sketch made on the spot, in this case a country road near the village of Méry to the east of Paris. The immediacy of the observed light and tonalities is abundantly evident.

Corot was one of the first French landscape painters to make the Forest of Fontainebleau and nearby villages a popular destination for plein air painters. By the 1860s it had become so famous and frequented by artists and tourists alike that Corot preferred other villages on the outskirts of Paris to paint, like Méry, which had remained more authentic. Nevertheless, it was works like the present one that inspired a later generation of French artists, including Camille Pissarro, and provided the foundation for the New Painting that came to be known as Impressionism. Indeed, Pissarro greatly admired Corot, whose work he had known since moving to Paris in 1855. His La route de Rocquencourt (fig. 1) similarly leads the viewer into the picture on a wide path, the surface of which is broken up by long shadows of trees.