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Oil on canvas
H. 0,36 m; W. 0,29 m
Signed and dated lower left COROT 1828 (or 1829)
Date: 1828 or 1829
Provenance: Private Collection, France
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In the autumn of 1825 Corot went to Rome, and the three years that he spent there were the most influential of his life. Not only did he paint the city’s landscapes and the countryside around Rome, but he also worked on several precise figure studies. (Robaut recorded more than twenty figure studies painted by the young artist during this first visit, see Robaut nos. 56-63 and 87-94.) He was known to frequently interrupt his walks to paint people in native costume, in an astonishingly simple and straightforward way. Corot’s obvious interest in creating a psychologically in-depth portrait of the models makes these studies works of their own.
When he returned to France in 1828, his newly discovered interest in depicting the human form prompted a series of portraits, mainly done in the early 1830s (see Robaut, nos. 247-253). His sitters were primarily family and friends whom he painted in a simple and realistic way, with an important emotional and psychological dimension.
The present portrait is part of a series influenced by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. Our sitter is presented in half-length, in a rigorous attitude, with a lot of care put to the rendering of his face, and a brown background that sets off the figure.
Corot’s portrait of his nephew Henri Sennegon shows a comparable attitude: sitting on a similar chair with his arms crossed, turned three-quarters to the right. As in our portrait, Corot has chosen a neoclassical monochrome background.
Other examples of Ingres-like portraits are the one of his painter friend Franēois-Auguste Biard, painted in 1830, today in Geneva and the portraits of Alexina Legoux and of his niece Louise Claire Sennegon, both in the Louvre (for the illustrations, see pdf file).
Although landscapes were his major interest, Corot returned to portraits and figure studies at the end of his life, when he did a series of young women posing in his studio, holding a flower or a musical instrument, or looking at a landscape on an easel. Corot rarely exhibited these pictures of a more private nature.
While the sitter of our work has not been identified, Martin Dieterle suggests that this painting is one of Corot's earliest portraits of a man. He dates it back to 1828-1829, immediately after Corot's return from Italy, and suggests that the sitter is a family friend. Corot's portraits throughout his career are primarily of women. Our sitter, in his pose and attitude, is a precursor to what is considered to be Corot's greatest male portrait, The Architect, Toussaint Lemaistre of 1833 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art).
We would like to thank Martin Dieterle for kindly confirming the authenticity of this painting. It will be included in the sixth supplement to Alfred Robaut's L'oeuvre de Corot currently being prepared by Martin Dieterle.
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