Giovane greca alla fontana

Corot was famous in his lifetime for misty grey-green landscapes, which sold about as fast as he could make them. The figure paintings he made alongside them he mostly kept. He rarely sent them to the Salon and rarely sold them, and it was the sale of his studio after his death in 1875 that put dozens of them in front of the public for the first time. This is one of those, a model in loosely classical dress standing at a fountain with a jar, from his last decade. The costume came out of his own store of studio clothes, which he used over and over for single standing figures. The Louvre dates the painting only to somewhere between 1865 and 1870, and it reached the museum by bequest in 1978, a hundred years and more after it was made.