Italian Villa behind Pine Trees

By 1860 Corot had not seen Italy in roughly 17 years. He had gone there as a young man in the 1820s and returned twice more, filling notebooks with quick studies of Roman light, umbrella pines and sun-warmed stone. This villa behind its screen of pines was painted far from all that, in his French studio, from memory and old sketches rather than in front of the motif. The tall pines with their flat, spreading crowns are unmistakably Italian, and the light keeps the dry clarity of the south, yet everything is softened, half-recalled. Work like this fed the vein Corot called his souvenirs, landscapes that record less a place than the feeling it left behind. The small figures near the villa are barely more than touches of the brush, put there to give the pines their scale.