Bacchanal at the Spring: Souvenir of Marly-le-Roi

Corot painted this in 1872, the year after the siege of Paris and the Commune. He was 76. He had given a large sum for the relief of Parisians during the siege, sat out the Commune at Arras, and in 1872 bought a house at Auvers for Honoré Daumier, who by then was blind and without resources. What he put on this canvas is a clearing in the woods at Marly-le-Roi, west of the city, with figures dancing, lounging and playing instruments among the trees. Marly had been Louis XIV's private escape from the ceremony of Versailles, and its château was pulled down in 1806 by a manufacturer who sold off the stone when his cotton mill failed. Critics had been asking Corot for years to clear the nymphs out of his woods and put peasants there instead. He was still placing them there in 1872, three years before his death.