House and Factory of Monsieur Henry

Monsieur Henry manufactured cloth in Soissons, north-east of Paris, and knew Corot's father, who ran a clothing business in the capital. In 1833 he asked the son to paint his property. Corot was 36, had spent three years in Italy and was still nobody in particular, and he treated the commission as a landscape rather than a portrait of a house, giving the workshops and the dwelling equal weight under the same light. That year the Salon jury awarded him a second-class medal, his first official recognition, for a view of the forest of Fontainebleau. He also painted a second canvas at Soissons, taken from the back of the house and looking across to the towers of the cathedral, which is now at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands. Henry, who appears to have regarded him as an amateur, never paid for either picture.