Saint Sebastian Succored by the Holy Women

Painted in 1874 and held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this late religious painting by Corot depicts the scene from early Christian hagiography in which holy women attend to the wounded Sebastian—a subject he took up late in his career alongside the landscape work for which he is primarily remembered. Corot's few religious paintings reflect the Barbizon generation's effort to revive a monumental figure tradition, and the Sebastian subject allowed him to combine his atmospheric landscape sensibility with a figure composition organized around care and tenderness rather than conventional martyrdom drama.

Corot treats the religious scene with the same soft atmospheric envelope that characterizes his landscape work, the figures of Sebastian and the holy women bathed in the diffused, silvery light of his late style. The forest setting allows him to integrate the figure group into his characteristic wooded landscape, the scene's tenderness enhanced by the gentle, non-dramatic quality of his light.