Bacchante with a Panther

By 1860 Corot was in his sixties and famous across France for soft, silvery landscapes of trees and misty water. This is a different side of him, one his public barely saw. A bacchante, one of the wine-god Bacchus's followers, lies stretched out in a wooded clearing, and beside her a panther leans in, tame as a large cat. Pictures like this stayed mostly in his studio while the landscapes went to the Salon, and younger painters who visited him came to prize them. The reclining woman set into a landscape reaches back to Venetian painting of three centuries earlier, to Giorgione and Titian. What is unmistakably Corot is the setting, the same feathery trees and hushed afternoon light he built his name on. The painting now hangs far from France, at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.