Island of San Bartolomeo, Rome

The name COROT in the lower right corner was not put there by Corot. The Boston museum catalogues this picture as a copy after him and describes the signature as false. It bought the painting in Paris in 1923 from a seller named Pierre Hentsch, for 2,000 dollars. The view is the Tiber island in Rome, its church tower and tall houses packed between two bridges, and whoever copied it kept Corot's own working method, oil on paper later mounted on canvas, which is how he painted out of doors during his first stay in Rome in the late 1820s. The museum lists the original it was copied from as untraced. A study by Corot of the same view, with nearly the same composition and almost the same size, does exist. It appeared at a Paris auction in 1917, catalogued only as attributed to Corot, and later spent some years in a private collection in Boston. Since 2001 it has belonged to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.