The Church at Rolleboise near Mantes

Corot gave this small picture to Charles-François Daubigny, a landscape painter some 20 years younger and a friend who often worked along the same rivers. Rolleboise is a village on the Seine just downstream from Mantes. A low church with a thin spire stands above the bank, the river curves away on the right, and a few young trees are still bare. The Louvre dates it only broadly, between 1850 and 1875. The picture stayed with Daubigny's family after his death in 1878, until his son Karl, a painter too, sold it in 1895 to another artist, Robert Wickenden. It then passed to the American collector Atherton Curtis, who lived in France. He and his wife gave it to the Louvre in 1938 but kept it at home for their lifetime, and it entered the museum in 1943.