The Four Times of Day: Noon

Corot painted this for a friend, not a client. The panel is one of four, Morning, Noon, Evening and Night, that he made toward the end of the 1850s to line the studio of the painter Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, who had a house at Fontainebleau, south of Paris. The story goes that Corot finished all four in a single week, to Decamps' astonishment. Noon is the drowsy one: the heavy light of midday, feathery grey-green trees, small figures resting in the heat. Decamps died in 1860, not long after, and the panels passed to the British painter Frederic Leighton, who bought them in 1865 and hung them in his London drawing room. They stayed in private hands for almost 150 years before the National Gallery took them in, in 2014.