The Rest of the Horses

By the mid-1850s Corot had finally won over the official art world. At the Paris world's fair of 1855 he took a first-class medal, and the state bought one of his misty landscapes. He was 59. Around that success he kept returning to a small set of favourite motifs, painting them from memory rather than from the field, and this clearing with horses resting at the edge of a wood is one of them. It repeats an earlier composition of his, the same soft grey light and feathery trees he had made his signature. The canvas is signed simply Corot. It came to the Louvre through a bequest in 1905 and has hung in Chartres, on loan from Paris, since 1976.