Morning near Beauvais

On 5 June 1886 the pictures of John Saulnier, a collector from Bordeaux who had recently died, were sold at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. The catalogue ran from Delacroix and Géricault to Millet, Boudin and Jongkind, and it included a vase of peonies by Manet that is now in the Musée d'Orsay. This Corot was lot 21 and fetched 5,400 francs. It did not yet carry the title it has now. When the Paris dealers Boussod, Valadon and Company had it in 1901 they entered it in their books as Prairie boisée au bord d'un ruisseau, a wooded meadow by a brook, and their buyers in New York listed it as The Brook in the Wood. Both names describe what is there. A brook comes in from the right past a red-roofed house half hidden in the trees, slender trunks rise almost bare against a pale sky, and two figures sit in the grass in the middle distance. A big willow, already in leaf, fills the left side. The museum dates the canvas only broadly, to about 1855 to 1865.