Marcoussis. Un verger le matin

This is a small canvas, not much bigger than a sheet of writing paper, painted at Marcoussis in the countryside south of Paris around 1865. Corot was nearly 70 by then and the most sought-after landscape painter in France. What he sent to the Salon were large misty souvenirs worked up indoors, while things this size were what he actually did standing in a field in the morning. Two small figures in the grass give the whole orchard its scale. It reached the Louvre in 1906 with the collection of Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, a painter and collector who helped bring Alfred Robaut's catalogue of Corot into print and then handed his own pictures over to the state.