ラ・ロシェルの港

Corot spent three weeks in the Atlantic port of La Rochelle in the summer of 1851, painting with a couple of friends, and made this view from an upstairs window looking over the harbour on the Quai Vallin. By then Corot was famous for soft, silvery, dreamlike landscapes with feathery trees. This canvas is the opposite of that. He built the quay and its round medieval towers out of clear, solid blocks of sunlit stone, the way the old masters Poussin and Claude had taught him decades earlier. It is calm, exact and warm with light. He thought well enough of it to send it to the Paris Salon the next year, which he rarely did with a plain topographical view, usually reserving those walls for religious or literary subjects.