清晨

By 1865 Corot was 69 and one of the most sought-after landscape painters in France, and this is the kind of thing buyers wanted from him. A tall canvas, nearly 1.8 metres high, with a young woman playing among winged cherubs in a dark glade while a pale light opens in a patch of sky behind her. Pictures like this were made indoors over the winter, in his Paris studio, out of memory and old sketchbooks. The plain outdoor studies that are prized now came from his summers. He signed and dated it at the lower left, Corot 1865. Armand Hammer, the oil executive who spent decades buying 19th-century French pictures, acquired it, and it hangs today in the Los Angeles museum he founded.