베수비오 화산

Corot got to Naples in the summer of 1828, at the end of his first Italian journey, and painted the mountain that every visitor came to see. Vesuvius was the last fixed stop of the Grand Tour. Travellers hired guides and mules at Resina and went up in the dark, because the glow inside the crater only showed at night.

They were climbing a mountain that had recently changed shape. In October 1822 the volcano threw out ash for days and took a substantial piece off its own summit, leaving the cone lower and the crater far deeper than the guidebooks of the previous generation described.

Corot worked on a sheet of paper 24 centimetres high and 41 wide, mounted onto wood only later. Etienne Moreau-Nelaton gave it to the Louvre in 1906, on the condition that it never be lent out.