Passiance, bei Saint-Avit

Corot's Passiance, bei Saint-Avit (1872), painted near the commune of Saint-Avit in the Périgord, belongs to his late period of lyrical landscape in which sustained relationships with specific rural localities generated intimate, poetic images. Despite the Religious genre classification, this is almost certainly a landscape near a chapel or church where Corot found the kind of quiet, meditative scenery his late 'souvenir' mode required. By the early 1870s Corot was in his late seventies and painting from memory and feeling as much as from direct observation, but his touch remained sure and his atmospheric sense undiminished.

The composition employs Corot's late technique of delicate, interlocking tonalities — feathery foliage, soft sky, and gently modeled ground — unified by a pervasive silver-grey light. The brushwork is loose and painterly, suggesting rather than defining forms with a discipline born of decades of observation.