Das Kolosseum, gesehen von den Farnesischen Gärten

Corot signed this one like a diary entry, lower right: Corot, mars 1826. He was 29, in Rome on his first Italian journey, and he had walked up the Palatine hill to the Farnese Gardens, a Renaissance garden laid out over the buried ruins of an imperial palace. From up there the Colosseum sits below you across a hollow of rubble and scrub. He worked on paper rather than canvas, fast and out of doors, the way the young French painters in Rome were then teaching themselves to work. Studies like this were private tools, made for the studio and not for exhibition. He kept it 23 years before sending it to the Paris Salon of 1849, and when he died in 1875 he left it to the Louvre, where it hangs in the French landscape room, about half a metre across.