Unknown_Corot-2012

31 . A Horseman and Traveler on Foot Nearing Two Trees , 1874

Charcoal and black chalk on laid paper; Watermark lower center: BL in a shield 10 ½ x 13 ¼ inches ( 26 . 5 x 33 . 5 cm) Signed and dated lower right

provenance Georges Bernheim, Paris; Paris Art Market; Jill Newhouse Gallery ( 1994 ).

exhi b i t ions New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Romanticism and the School of Nature , 2000 , no. 25 , p. 52 , (illus.).

Private Collection

Through his artist and photographer friends in Arras, Corot was introduced in the early 1850 s to cliché-verre, a technique for photographically reproducing drawings made on a glass plate. This sheet is closely related to a cliché-verre that Corot probably designed in the summer of 1874 , during a visit to the Arras photographer Desavary ( Horseman Pausing in the Countryside , 1874 , R 3220 ). Desavary also reproduced many of Corot’s works as photographic facsimilies, and may have intended to photograph this drawing as well. It is believed that Corot made this drawing at the same time as the cliché-verre, and retouched the charcoal with black chalk to strengthen the contrasts for Desavary’s camera (Ives and Barker, p. 52 ).

Horseman Pausing in the Countryside, 1874 , R 3220