The Village of Presles, near Beaumont-sur-Oise

Corot knew this village long before he painted it. As a baby he was sent out of Paris to a wet nurse in Presles, near L'Isle-Adam in the Oise valley, because his mother's shop on the rue du Bac left her no time to raise him. He stayed four years. His first biographers add that decades later, when he was famous, his foster sister would visit him in Paris and he would sit her down to dinner with him. This small canvas, only 37 centimetres wide, dates from around 1850. It is a quiet working view, rolling fields with the houses and church tower of Presles on the far slope and a blue line of hills behind. It now hangs in Baden, in Switzerland, in the former villa of the collectors Sidney and Jenny Brown, among their Degas and Cézanne pictures.