Pastoral Concert

Corot first showed a version of this at the Salon of 1844, then took it back and spent the next twelve years quietly changing it. He lowered the horizon, turned the sunlit meadow into a still pond, painted out a shepherd leaning on a tree and reworked the figures, until he sent it to the Salon of 1857 as effectively a new picture. Part of that shift came from a trip to England in 1852, where northern painting taught him to drop his horizons and give more of the canvas to sky and haze. What's left is three women resting by the water, one holding a cello, in the soft silvery light he became known for. The pond may be a memory of the lake at Nemi, near Rome, where he had stayed years earlier.