Italian woman at the fountain

Now and then Corot would set his landscapes aside for a week and paint a single model instead. This Italian woman at a fountain, from the late 1860s, comes out of that habit. She wears the folk costume of the countryside south of Rome, the kind of dress Corot had first seen on his Italian travels some 40 years earlier and kept using long after, posing paid models in it in his Paris studio. She is not a portrait, and her name is not recorded. He was chasing a certain mood, and these late figures share a stillness and an inward, faintly melancholy air. The fountain and the hint of open ground behind her are lightly brushed, almost an afterthought, so that everything holds on the quiet turn of her head and the fall of the costume.