Mortefontaine. Duck Pond

Mortefontaine is a park of lakes and old trees north of Paris, near Senlis, and through the 1850s Corot went back to it again and again. This quiet stretch of water with its ducks dates from 1855, one of many times he set up before these pools. What he saw there he kept. Nearly a decade later, in 1864, he gathered those memories into Souvenir de Mortefontaine, the misty lakeside scene now in the Louvre that many count as the masterpiece of his old age. Beside that famous picture this is a plainer, closer look at the same place. The water lies flat as glass, a few ducks slide across it, and the far bank thins into the feathery grey trees that people came to know as his.