Madame Stumpf and Her Daughter

Painted in 1872 and held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this double portrait of Madame Stumpf and her daughter is one of Corot's late figure works. Though primarily known as a landscape painter, Corot painted figures throughout his career with the same soft, enveloping atmospheric approach he brought to trees and meadows. The Stumpf women—evidently bourgeois subjects from Corot's social circle—are treated with the gentle, non-assertive quality that characterizes all his late paintings, their presence as atmospheric as any landscape detail.

Corot gives mother and daughter the same silvery, softly atmospheric treatment that characterizes his late style across all subjects. The figures are not precisely delineated but dissolved into the surrounding soft tonal environment, their features suggested rather than precisely described in the gentle, feathery technique of his final decade.