Monk in White, Seated, Reading

By the middle of the century the religious orders were back in France. The Revolution had suppressed them, and through the 1830s and 1840s they were rebuilt one house at a time, so a white habit was again an ordinary thing to pass in the street. Corot began painting monks around 1850, working in the studio where he kept a wardrobe of costumes for his models. Pictures like this one were not made for an audience. The public knew him as a landscape painter, and his figures stayed behind the studio door, seen by the friends who dropped in and by almost nobody else, until his death in 1875 sent the whole contents of the studio to auction. This canvas reached the Louvre in 1926 as a gift, and it hangs in room 948 among the French landscapes of 1820 to 1850.