The Letter

By the mid-1860s Corot was one of the most successful painters in France, and one of the most copied. Forgeries of his silvery landscapes were already circulating in numbers that still complicate his catalogue today. This small panel of a woman with a letter belonged to a quieter part of his working life. Corot painted figures largely for himself, rarely exhibited them, and showed them to a handful of friends in the studio, so the public knew him as a landscape man. The subject itself comes from much further back. A woman alone with a letter is a 17th-century Dutch idea, and Corot had stood in front of those pictures on a trip to Holland in 1854. Paris met this side of him properly at the sale of his studio contents at the Hôtel Drouot in May 1875, three months after he died.