Landscape near Ville d’Avray

Painted in 1873 and held at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, this late landscape by Corot near Ville-d'Avray—the suburb west of Paris where he maintained his family home throughout his life—represents the territory most intimately associated with his work. The ponds and woods of Ville-d'Avray appear in hundreds of Corot's paintings, from his early structural works to his vaporous late style. By 1873 the woods and pond views he had first painted as a young man had accumulated a lifetime of observation and affection, giving his late Ville-d'Avray works an aura of devoted, meditative return.

Corot's late Ville-d'Avray paintings have a distinctive silvery tonality achieved through thin, transparent veils of paint layered over a light ground. Trees are indicated with feathery strokes that suggest foliage without describing individual leaves, and the light has the soft, diffused quality of early morning or late afternoon at the pond's edge.