Ville-d'Avray

In 1817 Corot's father, a prosperous Paris draper, bought a country house at Ville-d'Avray, just west of the city, and the pond behind it became the one place Corot returned to for the rest of his life. He painted it in every season across almost 50 years. This version is from 1865, when he was nearing 70 and working in the soft, silvery manner of his last decade. The far buildings and the feathery willows dissolve into their own reflections in the pale water, the edges left deliberately blurred. Those thin grey-green trees are the thing his younger admirers would borrow. He kept the family house until the year he died.