Soissons Seen from Mr. Henry's Factory

In 1833, a cloth manufacturer named Henry, a friend of Corot's father, asked the painter to record the view from his home and factory just outside Soissons, in northern France. It was the kind of practical commission a landowner might want, a portrait of his property. What Corot handed back looks more like a 17th-century Dutch landscape. The horizon sits low, the sky rises high and fills with cloud, and the factory building turns at an angle in the foreground, drawing the eye out across the fields toward the town. In the grass a boy lies stretched out with a girl seated beside him, and the whole scene settles into quiet. Corot painted a second view for Henry as well, looking from the back of the house toward the spires of Soissons Cathedral, and it hangs in the same museum here in Otterlo.