The Four Times of Day

Around 1858 the painter Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, a friend of Corot's, asked him to decorate the studio of his house on the rue de France in Fontainebleau. Corot handed over four tall wooden panels, morning, noon, evening and night, each with trees at the sides opening onto a distance, the framing device Claude Lorrain had used two centuries earlier. The National Gallery reckons he got through all four in about a week. Decamps died in 1860 and his collection was auctioned in Paris five years later, where the buyer was the English painter Frederic Leighton. Leighton was building himself a house in Holland Park in London at the time, and he hung the panels in the drawing room and had the room finished around them, with blue floorboards and brown walls chosen to sit with their colours.