Saint-André-en-Morvan

Corot came to the Morvan, the wooded hill country of Burgundy, through his family. A niece of his had married into a family from Lormes, a small town in these hills, and he stayed there more than once, in 1841 and again in 1842. Saint-André-en-Morvan is a village in the same district, and he shows it from a sunken track, with the church and its pointed steeple on the crest above. A man with a stick over his shoulder and a young woman stand in the road, and a pig noses at the foot of a big tree. The local heritage society points out that he softened the relief, and the real slopes are steeper. He signed the canvas at the lower left, and a second signature sits on top of the first.