Attributed to Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

Corot painted 3,000 pictures, the saying went, of which 10,000 have been sold in America. The joke had a basis. In his last decades his silvery landscapes, feathery trees over still water with a figure or two in the grass, sold so well that copyists and forgers turned them out in quantity. When a French doctor named Jousseaume died in the early 1920s, he left 2,414 pictures he believed to be by Corot, and every one of them proved to be false.

Attributed to is the formula a museum uses when it thinks a picture probably is by the artist and cannot prove it. It says more than after Corot, which marks a copy of one of his compositions, and less than his name standing alone.

Among the pictures under it here, one belongs to Wawel Castle in Kraków, a landscape a metre wide painted at some point after 1850, which the castle's own record gives to Corot with a question mark. A cow and a goat graze at the left, a woman sits under tall, pale-trunked trees, and a sheet of water opens behind them. Another is in Boston, a view on the river Saône from about 1870, which came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1924.