Baronne Thénard

French, died c. 1906

Explore Selected Works

We look slightly down onto a man riding a white horse away from us on a dirt road winding through a sun-drenched, rocky landscape in this horizontal painting. The man wears a cobalt-blue jacket and soft black hat, and the rutted path he follows cuts along the side of a steep hill or mountain peak. The path extends from the bottom center of the composition and stretches up the right side toward a grove of sage-green trees with brown trunks. The trees fill the upper right half of the composition, and the tallest ones almost brush the top edge of the canvas. Closer examination reveals a person in a brown coat in the shade of the trees, just off the path ahead. Seen from the hips up, they face our right in profile. Scrubby plants, bushes, and saplings in tones of kelly, pea, and fern green sprout among the boulders that line the road. A broken, bare, segment of a silvery-gray tree trunk lies along the path to our left. Lit with brilliant sunlight coming from the lower left, the horse and rider, and the boulders lining the path cast mauve-purple shadows along the ochre-brown road. The rocky terrain to the left dips down into a valley and is in deep shadow. A mountain across the valley is also deep in shadow, painted dark brown. The landscape becomes steel gray and then hazy blue as it recedes into the deep distance. The horizon comes about halfway up the canvas. Gray and white clouds are scattered across a sky that deepens from pale blue along the top edge to nearly white at the horizon. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower left, “COROT. 1838.”
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, A View near Volterra, 1838, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.111

A View near Volterra

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot · 1838 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1963.10.111

Bibliography

1931

  • Hôtel Drouot, Secession de Mlle. T, Paris, 19 November 1931.