海黛

Corot painted this around 1870, while Paris was at war. He was in his mid-70s, refused to leave his studio during the Prussian siege of the city and gave large sums to the poor of Paris. When the Commune followed in the spring of 1871 he went north to Arras to stay with his friend Alfred Robaut, who was cataloguing his work. Pictures of this kind rarely left the studio. Corot was known for silvery landscapes, and the figures he posed indoors in Greek or Italian costume from his own store of props he showed to almost nobody. Even the name is a guess. The Louvre's catalogue says the title Haydee was perhaps taken from Byron's poem Don Juan, in which a Greek girl finds the hero washed up on her father's beach. The canvas came to the museum in 1965 as a gift from Baroness Eva Gourgaud.