Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Auguste Dreyfus (and sold, his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, May 29, 1889, lot 20)
Mante Collection, Marseille (acquired September 1891)
Julius Oehme, New York (according to a label on the stretcher)
Ehrich Galleries, New York (by 1933)
Private Collector, New York (acquired circa 1955)
Thence by descent through the family

Hanover, New Hampshire, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991-2017 (on periodic view, lent by the family of the present owner)

Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre de Corot, catalogue raisonné et illustré, Paris, 1965, vol. III, p. 168, no. 1697, illustrated p. 169

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work has an old lining. The paint layer is clean. Although the pigment used in the signature fluoresces slightly under ultraviolet light, this is all original. There are areas in the grass in front of the seated figure and on the left edge in the far bank of the lake which also fluoresce strongly, but these do not seem to correspond to restoration. There is a restored tear in the canvas running upwards from beneath the red roofed farmhouse, with a slight extension to the right, and a longer extension through the tree trunks to the left. The restoration is good. Although the damage is not minor, it is isolated and does not impact the remainder of the picture in any way.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

In the present work, a stand of silver birches rise against a grand expanse of active sky, their foliage broadly scumbled with small dappled strokes, in hues of sage green and pale yellow, evoking the glittering rustle of their small leaves in the wind. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s palette is unexpectedly bright throughout the composition; the ground is dotted with his confetti-like flowers and the pond reflects the pinks, whites and blue of the sky. Unconcerned with the didactic representation of the place before him, Corot uses his brush to conjure the intangible air, movement, sunshine and even scent. Les bouleaux des marais de Boves epitomizes what the writer Théodore de Banville (1823-1891) saw in Corot: “This is not a landscape painter, this is the very poet of landscape… who breathes the sadness and joys of nature… He knows more than anyone, he has discovered the customs of boughs and leaves; and now that he is sure he will not distort their inner life, he can dispense with all servile imitation” (as quoted in Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède, Corot, exh. cat., 1996-7, p. 262). In the last fifteen years of his career, Corot experienced a renewal of critical appreciation for his work. Collectors and dealers eagerly sought out his canvases, and throughout the 1860s and 1870s he was readily included in the Paris Salon, either because he was on the jury himself, or automatically admitted hors concours (a departure from his difficulties in the 1840s and 1850s). The younger generation of painters sought out his instruction and approval, Berthe Morisot among them and Camille Pissarro identifying as a pupil of Corot in Salon brochures, while Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley each experimented with the artist’s techniques in the 1860s (Tinterow, p. 260). The French Art critic Charles Blanc remembered in 1877 that Corot “was loved like a comrade and respected like a master” (as quoted in Tinterow, p. 259), and Monet wrote in 1897 “There is only one master here - Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing” (as quoted in Tinterow, p. xiv). Monet, now synonymous with capturing the fleeting aspects of light while painting en plein air, may have been nodding to compositions like Les bouleaux des marais de Boves with his series of Poplars in 1891 (fig. 1). With an obvious compositional similarity, Monet has distilled his palette and reduced the details of the landscape, conveying depth of field while flattening the elements to pure form and color.

When Corot’s close friend Constant Dutilleux died in 1865, the artist shouldered the mantle of paterfamilias and spent his summers traveling throughout France and Switzerland, visiting the numerous Dutilleux family members as well as friends. It may have been on the way to Arras, where one of Dutilleux’s daughter’s family resided, that Corot visited rural Boves, a small town in the Somme, southeast of Amiens. The large scale and iconic imagery of the present work must have attracted the work’s first owner, French trading scion Auguste Dreyfus. He and his second wife Luisa Gonzalés filled their elegant home at 3 avenue Ruysdaël in Paris with an exceptional collection of paintings, sculptures, tapestries and antiquities. Les bouleaux des marais de Boves was one of 116 paintings by contemporary masters, including Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny and Jehan Georges Vibert (many of which had been bought directly from the Salon), which were sold in 1889, as the Dreyfus family moved to their newly purchased country home Château de Pontchartrain in the Île de France. The sale also included works by the Old Masters, including Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez and Pietro Martire Neri’s Portrait of Cristoforo Segni, Maggiordomo to Pope Innocent X (lot 115 in 1889 and sold in these rooms, February 1, 2018, lot 48, for $4,066,000) and Bullfight in a Divided Ring, now attributed to Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, and in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 22.181).



We would like to thank Martin Dieterle and Claire Lebeau for kindly confirming the authenticity of this lot.