The Cart, Memory of Marcoussis

In 1855 Paris held its first world's fair, and the fine-arts palace on the Avenue Montaigne was filled with French painting. Corot showed there, and this landscape was bought for Napoleon III out of the civil list, the emperor's personal allowance from the state. A cart with two figures rolls along a sandy track near Marcoussis, a village south of the capital that Corot knew well, and a labourer stoops at the roadside under tall trees. Most of the canvas is sky. The picture did not stay with the imperial family. By 1889 it belonged to a private collector and was shown again at the world's fair of 1889, the one that gave the city the Eiffel Tower. It entered the Louvre in 1910 with the bequest of Alfred Chauchard, co-founder of the Grands Magasins du Louvre.