Monk Reading

Among the pictures Corot showed at the Salon of 1840 were a Flight into Egypt, a young goatherd playing a flute, and this monk, signed and dated that year at the lower right. Each puts a figure at the heart of a landscape, and the academic ranking of the day still placed a subject with people in it above a plain view. Here the figure dominates. A bearded, balding monk in a brown habit tied with a cord stands on a dusty path, reading from an open book. Behind him the ground opens onto a dry, sunlit plain with low trees, a man resting in the shade of a larger tree and a pale building on the horizon. The canvas later passed through the Paris gallery of the dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, whose wax seal it still carries.