Forest of Fontainebleau

In 1834 a plain landscape was still not quite respectable at the Paris Salon. To be taken seriously, a view of nature was expected to carry a religious or mythological subject. Corot met the rule halfway. He built this forest in the studio from oil sketches he had made outdoors at Fontainebleau, the woods southeast of Paris where a whole generation of French painters went to work straight from nature. Into that real place he tucked a small figure, a woman reclining with loose hair and a deer nearby, whom contemporaries would have read as Mary Magdalene alone in the wilderness. It was shown at the Salon of 1834 under the heading of historic landscape, a category invented to lend landscape some of the prestige of history painting.