The Piazzetta, Venice

In May 1875, three months after Corot's death, the paintings left in his studio were sold over three days at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, and each was stamped VENTE COROT in red, as this one is at the lower left. Prices ran very wide. Lot 149, the huge Dante and Virgil that now belongs to the same museum, went for 15,000 francs. This sketch, lot 47, went for 320. The buyer was Frederick Frothingham of Milton, just south of Boston, and whoever annotated one copy of the sale catalogue wrote his name down as Ischingham. Corot had painted it in the summer of 1828, when he stopped in Venice on his way home from Rome. It is on paper, barely 16 centimetres high. The two granite columns stand on the waterfront, the winged lion of Saint Mark on the left and Saint Theodore on the right, and their early morning shadows stretch across the empty paving. Between them, across the water, are the red bell tower and the dome of San Giorgio Maggiore, with a few sails in front. Frothingham died in 1891, and the sketch came to the museum by his bequest three years later.