Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in Her Bath)

By 1836 Corot was known mostly as a landscape painter, and landscape ranked low in the official order of things. To be taken seriously a French artist still needed to show a proper history painting at the Salon, the state exhibition in Paris, so that year Corot sent this large mythological scene. It comes from Ovid. The hunter Actaeon stumbles on the goddess Diana bathing with her nymphs, and for that accident she will turn him into a stag to be torn apart by his own hounds. What Corot cared about is around the figures. The trees, the pool and the soft grey light look like a real wood he might have walked through, rather than the tidy stage-set earlier painters used for their myths.