Dardagny, Morning

In the summer of 1853 Corot spent July and August at Dardagny, a village in the countryside west of Geneva, as the guest of Jacques and Elise Giraud, the parents-in-law of his friend the painter Armand Leleux. He went to Switzerland more often than to any other country in Europe, and his mother's father had come from the region of Fribourg. That summer he also finished a decorative screen that Leleux and the landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny had started. This small view was almost certainly painted during the stay, with the fields yellow with ripe corn and the blue line of the Jura hills behind. The quick, fluid brushwork suggests he at least began it outdoors, in front of the view. The woman in the straw hat walking beside a brown cow may have been added later, back in the studio.