The Vale

A vallon is a small valley, a fold in open country, and this one is gentle. A green slope drops away in the foreground, broken into patches of sun and shade. A brown cow grazes in the middle, a man crouches in the grass at the right, and on the path at the left a little group of women and children has stopped. A clump of trees leans over the hollow, and far off on the horizon a church spire just shows. Almost half the panel is sky, grey and white cloud piled up over the fields. The Louvre dates it only broadly, between 1850 and 1875. It is painted on wood and signed at the lower left. The collector George Thomy Thiéry left it to the Louvre in 1902, and it hangs in Room 948.