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拍品专文
Une paysanne et sa vache à la mare en vue d'un village boasts a distinguished provenance that connects it to one of the great American collectors during the 19th century and one of America’s founding families during the 20th century. Purchased by Henry ‘Harry’ Osborne Havemeyer from M. Knoedler & Co. in 1888, it is one of six Corot landscapes that Harry and his wife Louisine Havemeyer would come to own during the course of their collecting history. They eventually turned their focus to the artist's figure paintings and assembled a fine collection of some nineteen pictures of this kind. Louisine, a friend of Mary Cassatt, was the driving force behind the couple’s collection of contemporary European paintings and would have no doubt been aware of Corot’s legacy as the most important French landscape painter of the 19th century, though both Harry and Louisine had to agree on a painting’s importance for it to enter into their collection. After Louisine’s death in 1929, a larger portion of their collection was gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though Une paysanne et sa vache à la mare en vue d'un village remained with the family, passing into the Frelinghuysen family by descent.
Corot’s late landscapes have long been celebrated for the artist's subtle rendering of the effects of light within his canvases, often shrouded in a veiled half-light or a quickly dispersing mist of the early morning hours. Corot preferred to work during the earliest hours of the day, often waking at 3:00 a.m. in order to arrive on site with his portable easel and paints before first light and capture the landscape at the break of dawn. It is this skillful ability to capture fleeting effects of light on the landscape that led the Impressionist painters to dub the older artist ‘Pére Corot.’ The present picture is a lovely demonstration of some of these effects, the clear early light just touching the edges of the clouds as a bergère attends to a single cow that has perhaps wandered off during the night. A smaller creature, probably the animal's calf, is partly discernible in the shadows higher up on the hillside.
'Corot is the patriarch of the French landscape,' wrote Jules Castagnary in his commentary on the Salon of 1873. 'He has been painting for fifty years. If fame came late to him, talent did not. When one thinks that the hand that placed these deft touches carries the weight of seventy-seven years, such fortitude comes as a surprise and a marvel. The illustrious old man is the lone survivor of a vanished past' (J. Castagnary, 'Salon de 1873,' Salons (1857-1870, 1872-1879), vol. 2, Paris, 1892, p. 73). Fame had indeed only come to Corot during the mid-1860s, when his annual contributions of landscapes to the Salon finally met with wide acclaim from both critics and the public alike. He showed seven important paintings at the Exposition universelle of 1867 in Paris for which he received a medal and the title of Officier de la Légion d'Honneur. The Parisian dealer Alphonse Cadart had also included ten Corots in a group exhibition of French painting which he organized and sent to America the year before. This exhibition was to play an integral role in introducing Corot’s work to audiences in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
Collectors clamored at Corot's door in response and the artist was hard pressed to meet the increased demand for his landscapes. These paintings represent a deeply felt and aesthetically refined evocation of time and place, and were prized for their sensitivity and poetry. Corot's landscapes were unlike the more straightforward naturalistic scenes of the other French landscape painters. Théodore de Banville praised Corot in his review of the Salon of 1861: 'This is not a landscape painter, this is the very poet of landscape who breathes the sadness and joys of nature. The bond, the great bond that makes us the brothers of brooks and trees, he sees it; his figures, as poetic as his forests, are not strangers in the woodland that surrounds them. He knows more than anyone, he has discovered all the customs of boughs and leaves; and now that he is sure he will not distort their inner life, he can dispense with all servile imitation' (quoted in ibid., p. 262).
Progressively minded commentators, as well as the Impressionist artists themselves, acknowledged the debt owed to Corot as the forbearer of Impressionism, which Edmond Duranty discussed in his seminal pamphlet 'The New Painting,' published in 1876, a year after Corot's death. 'The roots of the new painting lie also in the work of the great Corot, that man who was always searching, and whom Nature seems to have loved because she revealed so many of her secrets to him' (quoted in the full text version, The New Painting, exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, p. 41). Castagnary wrote of Corot's pictures in the 1874 Salon, the last to which the painter contributed during his lifetime, 'A master in his turn, he saw many generations of young men pass through his studio. They came to ask him the secret of his strength. 'Feel deeply,' he told them, 'and communicate your emotion.' How many eyes did he open? How many hands unbind? How many brains set free! And there he is, still standing, still struggling, as young as ever' (ibid, pp. 101-102).
Interest in Corot's paintings had been growing slowly but steadily in America since the Cadart exhibition of 1866 -- four of the five paintings that were shown in Boston were purchased by collectors there. By the early 1870s there were paintings by Corot in Baltimore, Providence, and further west in Cincinnati and Saint Louis. The artist's work could be found in a half-dozen Philadelphia collections, and New Yorkers had come on board as well. At the end of the decade, Marian G. van Rensselaer proclaimed to the readers of The Century Magazine that Corot was 'one of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived' ('Corot,' The Century Magazine, June 1889, p. 256). Even after Americans developed a taste for Impressionism, thanks largely to the Havemeyers' pioneering advocacy of 'the new painting,' enthusiasm among rising and now famous major American collectors for acquiring Corot continued unabated into the next century.
Corot’s late landscapes have long been celebrated for the artist's subtle rendering of the effects of light within his canvases, often shrouded in a veiled half-light or a quickly dispersing mist of the early morning hours. Corot preferred to work during the earliest hours of the day, often waking at 3:00 a.m. in order to arrive on site with his portable easel and paints before first light and capture the landscape at the break of dawn. It is this skillful ability to capture fleeting effects of light on the landscape that led the Impressionist painters to dub the older artist ‘Pére Corot.’ The present picture is a lovely demonstration of some of these effects, the clear early light just touching the edges of the clouds as a bergère attends to a single cow that has perhaps wandered off during the night. A smaller creature, probably the animal's calf, is partly discernible in the shadows higher up on the hillside.
'Corot is the patriarch of the French landscape,' wrote Jules Castagnary in his commentary on the Salon of 1873. 'He has been painting for fifty years. If fame came late to him, talent did not. When one thinks that the hand that placed these deft touches carries the weight of seventy-seven years, such fortitude comes as a surprise and a marvel. The illustrious old man is the lone survivor of a vanished past' (J. Castagnary, 'Salon de 1873,' Salons (1857-1870, 1872-1879), vol. 2, Paris, 1892, p. 73). Fame had indeed only come to Corot during the mid-1860s, when his annual contributions of landscapes to the Salon finally met with wide acclaim from both critics and the public alike. He showed seven important paintings at the Exposition universelle of 1867 in Paris for which he received a medal and the title of Officier de la Légion d'Honneur. The Parisian dealer Alphonse Cadart had also included ten Corots in a group exhibition of French painting which he organized and sent to America the year before. This exhibition was to play an integral role in introducing Corot’s work to audiences in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
Collectors clamored at Corot's door in response and the artist was hard pressed to meet the increased demand for his landscapes. These paintings represent a deeply felt and aesthetically refined evocation of time and place, and were prized for their sensitivity and poetry. Corot's landscapes were unlike the more straightforward naturalistic scenes of the other French landscape painters. Théodore de Banville praised Corot in his review of the Salon of 1861: 'This is not a landscape painter, this is the very poet of landscape who breathes the sadness and joys of nature. The bond, the great bond that makes us the brothers of brooks and trees, he sees it; his figures, as poetic as his forests, are not strangers in the woodland that surrounds them. He knows more than anyone, he has discovered all the customs of boughs and leaves; and now that he is sure he will not distort their inner life, he can dispense with all servile imitation' (quoted in ibid., p. 262).
Progressively minded commentators, as well as the Impressionist artists themselves, acknowledged the debt owed to Corot as the forbearer of Impressionism, which Edmond Duranty discussed in his seminal pamphlet 'The New Painting,' published in 1876, a year after Corot's death. 'The roots of the new painting lie also in the work of the great Corot, that man who was always searching, and whom Nature seems to have loved because she revealed so many of her secrets to him' (quoted in the full text version, The New Painting, exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, p. 41). Castagnary wrote of Corot's pictures in the 1874 Salon, the last to which the painter contributed during his lifetime, 'A master in his turn, he saw many generations of young men pass through his studio. They came to ask him the secret of his strength. 'Feel deeply,' he told them, 'and communicate your emotion.' How many eyes did he open? How many hands unbind? How many brains set free! And there he is, still standing, still struggling, as young as ever' (ibid, pp. 101-102).
Interest in Corot's paintings had been growing slowly but steadily in America since the Cadart exhibition of 1866 -- four of the five paintings that were shown in Boston were purchased by collectors there. By the early 1870s there were paintings by Corot in Baltimore, Providence, and further west in Cincinnati and Saint Louis. The artist's work could be found in a half-dozen Philadelphia collections, and New Yorkers had come on board as well. At the end of the decade, Marian G. van Rensselaer proclaimed to the readers of The Century Magazine that Corot was 'one of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived' ('Corot,' The Century Magazine, June 1889, p. 256). Even after Americans developed a taste for Impressionism, thanks largely to the Havemeyers' pioneering advocacy of 'the new painting,' enthusiasm among rising and now famous major American collectors for acquiring Corot continued unabated into the next century.