Bohémienne à la mandoline

Corot made his name with soft, silvery landscapes, the kind that sold well and got copied endlessly. But in his studio he kept painting something the public barely saw in his lifetime: single figures, often young women in costume, posed quietly against a plain ground. This girl with a mandolin is one of them, made around the early 1870s, when Corot was in his late seventies and close to the end of his life. The costume is a studio prop, not a document of anyone's world. What he cares about is the same thing as in the landscapes, the way a gentle, even light settles on a face, a sleeve, the curve of the instrument. He left dozens of these figures behind, most of them unknown until after he was gone.