Souvenir of the Naples Countryside

This canvas is almost two metres tall and just over 30 centimetres wide, an odd shape for a landscape, because it was made to fit a bathroom wall. In the early 1840s Corot painted six such panels for François-Parfait Robert, a friend in Mantes on the Seine who often had him to stay. Five of them recalled places Corot had seen in Italy, among them Rome, Venice and the gulf of Genoa; the sixth showed a gorge in the Tyrol. This one remembers the country around Naples, which he had visited in 1828. The narrow format pushes everything upward, with tall trees rising almost the full height of the panel, a pale rock face behind them and a small figure standing at their foot. Robert's sons gave the set to the Louvre in 1926, and Room 947 is fitted out as the original room, with the panels shown together.