Saint-André-en-Morvan

Corot painted Saint-André-en-Morvan in 1842 during one of his sketching campaigns through the French countryside. The Morvan region in Burgundy, with its wooded hills and quiet villages, offered the kind of modest, unspoiled landscape that Corot preferred to the dramatic Alpine or Mediterranean scenery favored by academic painters. Characteristic of the artist's mature approach, the work displays silvery atmospheric tonality in late works, classical Italian light and structure in early works, poetic memory landscapes of feathery foliage and silver-grey tones.

Corot's plein-air approach captures the specific quality of Burgundian light with silvery-green tonalities and soft atmospheric effects, the restrained palette achieving a poetic naturalism that anticipates Impressionism.