Castel Sant'Angelo and Tiber

Corot painted this during his first stay in Italy, between 1826 and 1827, when he was around 30 and teaching himself to work quickly outdoors, straight from what he saw. He went back to this stretch of the Tiber several times, drawn to the round bulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo, which had begun life as the emperor Hadrian’s tomb and later served the popes as a fortress and prison. What is striking for the date is how loosely it is handled. The water, the sky, and the far bank are laid in with broad, soft strokes that look ahead to the Impressionists still decades off. The painting reached the Louvre in 1906, given by the collector and painter Étienne Moreau-Nélaton.