Lot 108
  • 108

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

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Description

  • Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
  • Epernon (Eure-Et-Loir) La Route au Laboureur
  • Signed Corot (lower left)
  • Oil on canvas
  • 13 7/8 by 18 5/8 in.
  • 35.2 by 47.3cm

Provenance

Collection Bériot, Paris (1876)
Boussod et Valadon, Paris (1894)
Simon and Behrens, Hambourg
M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York (by 1922)
Norman K. Woolworth (sold: Sotheby Parke Bernet Inc., New York, October 31, 1962, lot 8)

Exhibited

New York, Wildenstein & Co, Corot, 1969, no. 39

Literature

Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre de Corot, vol. 3, no. 1328, pp. 30-31, illustrated p. 31

Catalogue Note

Paths and roads are frequent motifs in Corot's work, and these means of passage were often populated with peasants at work or in conversations.  "Although peasants occur frequently throughout Corot's work," writes Michael Clarke, "it is unlikely that he sought to make any political points about them.  They were essentially staffage, as they had been for painters since the seventeenth century, in function no different from figures that decorated Dutch landscapes, or in Corot's own time, the gaily costumed Italian peasants of Léopold Robert (1794-1835).  By illustrating French peasants, however, Corot was in tune with a general desire for them to be so represented" (Clarke, Corot and the Art of Landscape, New York, 1991, p. 66).

However it would appear that Corot also had more personal reasons for including peasant figures in his landscapes.  He said that he "very much likes figures animating his landscapes; he wants to have company in the woods, in the valleys, along rivers, to see animals and people rambling around the countryside, where he could not live absolutely alone," (quoted in Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède, Corot, New York, 1996, p. 27).  With his pipe, carter's hat and peasant smock, Corot affected the part of the peasant himself, perhaps as a conscious revolt against the world of fashion from which deirved his family wealth, and of which he refused to become a part.