Corots Atelier

After 1865 Corot painted the inside of his own workroom six times over, always with a young woman seated in front of the easel. She is not painting. She is looking at a finished landscape propped on it, one of the soft grey-green views that made his fortune.

Those views were made where she is sitting. Corot's reputation rested on going out into the countryside with a portable panel, and he had done exactly that for 40 years, but the pictures he sold in his last decade were assembled indoors, in his Paris studio on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere, out of old sketchbooks and memory. Here he put that arrangement on the canvas and let a visitor look at the result.

This version is small, about 63 centimetres tall, and it is one of several. Another hangs in Washington. It came to the Louvre in 1911 with the collection of the banker Isaac de Camondo.