Le Bain de Diane

In 1855 Paris threw a vast world's fair, the Exposition Universelle, all machines and industry and national pride under glass, France answering the great London show of a few years before. Corot, by then in his late fifties, showed this among it. The picture steps right out of that noisy present. He takes an old story from the poet Ovid: the goddess Diana bathing with her companions in the moment before the hunter Actaeon stumbles on them and is turned into a stag for it. But Corot barely tells the drama. He gives you silvery light falling through tall feathery trees, pale figures in the water, the whole scene hushed and half-dissolved in air. He stayed fond of this one. In 1872 he travelled down to Bordeaux, where it had come to live, simply to stand in front of it again.