Wheatfield in the Morvan

In the summer of 1842 Corot was in the Morvan, the wooded hill country of Burgundy, and over several trips in that decade he found the subjects for around 15 pictures there. This is one of the plainest. There is no castle, no ruin, no picturesque bridge, only a field of ripening wheat, a line of trees against low hills, and two peasants at work, one bent over the crop, the other standing. In Paris at the time, some critics found Corot's handling too loose and called his pictures unfinished. Four years later the poet Charles Baudelaire took up his defence in a review of the Salon of 1846, drawing a line between a painting that is truly made and one that is merely polished. The quick, economical touch in the greens here is what he had in mind. The canvas came to Lyon in 1884, bequeathed by the collector Alfred Bellet du Poisat.