Landscape

Landscape, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is one of Corot's late works from around 1872, painted in the feathery silvery manner that characterised his last decade and became enormously influential on a generation of French painters. By this point Corot had largely abandoned the structural clarity of his Italian studies in favour of an atmospheric poetry in which trees, light, and occasionally figures dissolve into tonal harmonies of grey-green and silver. The Rijksmuseum acquired this work as part of its substantial holdings of nineteenth-century French painting.

Corot builds the landscape through the soft, feathery brushwork of his late style — forms dissolving at their edges into the silvery atmosphere that envelops the whole composition. His palette is restricted to the grey-green harmonies he favoured in his final decade, the tonal unity creating a dreamlike stillness that transcends the specific scenery depicted.