Orphée ramenant Eurydice des enfers

Corot made this after a night at the theatre. In 1859 Hector Berlioz staged a celebrated revival of Gluck's old opera Orpheus and Eurydice in Paris, with the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot in the lead, and it was the talk of the season. Corot, then in his sixties and long known for hazy, silvered landscapes, took the myth into his own idiom. Orpheus leads his wife up from the land of the dead, lyre in hand, through a dawn-lit wood dissolved in soft grays and greens. It is the calm before the ruin, before he turns to look and loses her a second time. Corot sent the finished picture to the Paris Salon of 1861.