Mountain of the Roman countryside. The Rock of the Nazens

In Corot's day the countryside around Rome was thinly settled. Malaria made the low ground dangerous in summer, villages kept to the hilltops, and the open slopes were left to flocks and the men who drove them. This study shows that country much as he found it. A bare, flat-topped rock rises above a slope of dry, yellowed grass, and clouds break over the ridge behind. The only person in sight is a small figure with a staff, crossing the grass in the foreground. The Louvre names the rock as the Rocher des Nazons and dates the study broadly, somewhere between 1825 and 1850, the years that take in Corot's journeys to Italy.