모르트퐁텐의 추억

The title is a clue to how Corot worked by the 1860s. This is not a place painted in front of the motif but a memory of one, Mortefontaine, a village north of Paris where he had spent time in the 1850s watching light settle on still ponds. He called such pictures souvenirs, recollections, and built them in the studio from feeling as much as fact. A woman and children linger under tall, feathery trees beside a mirror-flat lake, and the mood is what he was after, not the topography. Younger painters studied that soft, silvered handling of leaves closely, and some of them would soon be called Impressionists. Napoleon III's household had bought the picture straight from Corot in 1864, and it hung in the palace at Fontainebleau for 25 years before it reached the Louvre.