Forest of Fontainebleau

Corot showed this big canvas at the Salon of 1846, and the Boston museum counts its acceptance as a landmark for him, because the jury seldom admitted a large landscape without a mythological or historical subject to carry it. Here there is none. A cow wades into a forest pool among sandstone boulders, a herdsman follows more cattle out from under the trees, and oaks fill most of the sky. After the Salon the picture went back to his studio and stayed there for 26 years. In July 1870 Auguste Anastasi, a landscape painter who had studied with Corot, went completely blind, and early in 1872 his fellow artists gave works to a sale in his aid at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. Corot gave this one. Alfred Robaut, the friend who later catalogued his work, bought it for 4,000 francs, and according to Robaut, Corot signed it only after the sale.