Das Bassin der Académie de France in Rom

The French Academy had only been in the Villa Medici since 1803, when Napoleon took the villa in exchange for the palace on the Corso that a Roman crowd had sacked ten years earlier. By the time Corot reached Rome in 1825, the terrace of that new house was the most worked-over spot in the French colony, and the stone basin near its edge, with the dome of Saint Peter's beyond the trees, was the view everyone tried. Corot had no prize behind him and no room in the building. He was 29, living on an allowance from his parents, Paris clothiers who had let him leave the drapery trade only three years before. He came back to this motif more than once across his three Italian years, and the small canvas in Beauvais was most likely put together indoors from studies made on the terrace.