Farmyard at Sin, near Douai, with Children at Play

In November 1891 this small canvas was bought in New York by Brayton Ives. He had come out of the Civil War a colonel, brevetted brigadier general for gallantry, and from 1878 to 1880 he was president of the New York Stock Exchange. He was best known as a collector of books, with a Gutenberg Bible among them, and in March of that same year his library had gone to auction in New York. The dealers' stock books record the picture simply as La ferme, the farm. Corot painted it in 1872 at Sin, a village on the southern edge of Douai in the far north of France, and sold it that year to a buyer recorded only as Monsieur Grédelue. A Paris dealer, Gustave Tempelaere, later left his stamp on the back. In front of a steep-roofed farmhouse half hidden by trees, three children play together on the grass, the smallest held between the other two, while a woman with a basket stands watching at the left. The canvas is 33 centimetres high.