Reminiscence of the Beach of Naples

The museum in Tokyo dates this canvas between 1870 and 1872. In those years Corot, well into his seventies, stayed on in Paris through the Prussian siege and gave a large sum for the city's poor. What he painted, though, was a place he had seen once, more than 40 years earlier. On his first trip to Italy in the late 1820s he went briefly to Naples and brought back small sketches of the castle, Vesuvius, Ischia and Amalfi. Here the city itself has almost disappeared. Two women come dancing up a woodland path, one carrying a child, the other lifting a tambourine, and far behind them the bay opens out with a few boats on the shore. The canvas is unusually tall and narrow, 175 centimetres high and less than half as wide, so the trees do most of the work. Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art bought it in 1970, almost exactly a century after Corot painted it.