Detail of A Woman Reading by Corot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, July 2010

Artist: Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875)

Title: A Woman Reading

Date: 1869 and 1870

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 21 3/8 x 14 3/4 in. (54.3 x 37.5 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Gift of Louise Senff Cameron, in memory of her uncle, Charles H. Senff, 1928

Accession Number: 28.90

On View


Gallery Label:

When the seventy-two-year-old Corot showed "A Woman Reading" at the Salon of 1869, the critic Théophile Gautier praised its naïveté and its color but criticized the faulty drawing of the figure, noting the rarity of figures in Corot's work. Although the artist had painted similar figure studies after the late 1850s, this was the first and one of the very few that he exhibited.

Close examination of the surface reveals that Corot reworked the landscape. A photograph of the painting when it was exhibited at the Salon indicates that originally there was a willow at the left whose foliage nearly covered the sky, and a mass of trees at the right. A lithographic copy of the painting, made by Emile Vernier in 1870, reproduces it with the present, open sky; thus, Corot must have repainted the work immediately after he retrieved it from the Salon.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/europe...