The Gypsies

The Gypsies, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dates to around 1872 and belongs to the group of figure-in-landscape paintings Corot produced throughout his career that combine his tonal landscape mastery with an interest in human presence as a poetic rather than social subject. Gypsies and other wandering figures appeared frequently in Romantic-era painting as symbols of freedom from bourgeois convention, and Corot — an unmarried man who travelled throughout Europe sketching — found in the wanderer a naturally sympathetic subject.

Corot integrates the gypsy figures into the landscape through tonal continuity — they share the same silvery atmospheric treatment as the surrounding trees and misty ground — preventing them from standing out as genre figures against a backdrop. The figures are broadly painted, their specific details subordinated to the overall atmospheric harmony.