El reposo

Corot made his name with soft, silvery landscapes, but here the land is only a setting for a single reclining woman, stretched out at her ease with a tambourine near her hand. He painted it in 1860 and then, as he often did, kept returning to it, reworking the canvas over the following decade. By this point Corot was in his sixties and long established, admired by the younger painters who would soon be called Impressionists and who prized exactly this loose, tender handling of light. The woman is usually read as a bacchante, a follower of the wine god Bacchus, resting after the dance, the tambourine beside her the instrument she has just set down.