真珠の女

When Corot painted this, around 1868, he was in his seventies and famous across France for soft, silvery landscapes. Portraits like this one he mostly kept to himself. The young woman sits with her hands folded and her head slightly turned, a pose that quietly echoes the Mona Lisa hanging a few rooms away in the Louvre, though in the 1860s Leonardo's picture was a painter's favourite rather than the world's most famous face. Now look at her forehead. What catches the light there, and gives the painting its name, was long taken for a pearl. It is really a small leaf from the wreath in her hair, and the title stuck after the 1889 world's fair in Paris. Corot's own cataloguer noted the oddity in 1892: a strange name, he wrote, for what is really a leaf.