Diana Bathing (The Fountain)

By 1869 Corot was in his early seventies and long past needing to prove anything. The Salon celebrated him, and younger painters treated his silvery, feathery trees almost as a secret worth learning. Here he reaches back to an older idea, the mythological landscape, and sets Diana, the goddess of the hunt, bathing at a woodland fountain. Look closely at the goddess, though, and she is a specific young Parisian. Corot's model was Emma Dobigny, who also sat for Degas and for Puvis de Chavannes, posed in the studio and then set into an imagined grove. He worked through at least three close variants of this scene in these final years, one of them now in Moscow. The soft grey-green foliage he was famous for is what his admirers came to see.