Unknown_Corot-2012

30 . Landscape , c. 1870 s

Charcoal, stumping on buff paper 9 7 ⁄ 8 × 11 ¾ inches ( 25 . 0 × 30 . 0 cm) Signed lower left

provenance Paris Art Market; Jill Newhouse Gallery ( 2009 ).

Private Collection

Two lush groups of trees and two figures form the rhyming focus of this late landscape drawing by Corot. The sheet can be instructively compared to a charcoal drawing in the Louvre that Robaut dated 1871–2 , Cluster of Tress with a Goatherd (RF 8815 ). Both works, executed on buff paper of roughly the same size, demonstrate Corot’s mastery of a charcoal and stump technique that he developed toward the end of his life. Using the charcoal to create boldly gestural, calligraphic lines and varying densities of line and tone, he would apply the blending stump to subtly merge the edges of the landscape elements and spatial registers into an image unified by subtle shifts in values. Arlette Sérullaz has described Cluster of Trees with Goatherd as “a fine example of the scenes drawn in charcoal by Corot towards the end of his life, whereby combining dark and velvety accents, gently reworked with the stump, he was able to create landscapes whose outlines merge in a melancholy twilight atmosphere” (Sérullaz, 2007 , p. 80 ). Corot produced similar, tonally-driven effects in many of the paintings of this last phase of his life. The sophisticated tonal structure of these works was of particular interest to the group of painters and photographers from Arras who comprised Corot’s ‘second family’ in his later years: Robaut and Desavary, the first owner of Cluster of Trees with Goatherd .

Cluster of Trees with a Goatherd, c. 1870 s, Musée du Louvre, Paris