Footnotes

Provenance
Georges Bernheim, Paris, 1872.
With Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, by 1875.
With Knoedler & Co., New York, b 1912.
Mary Schuyler Shieffelin.
Anon. sale, Christie's, New York, 30 October 2002, lot 24 (sold as Property from the estate of the above).
Private collection, Beverly Hills.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2021.

Literature
Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre de Corot, catalogue raisonné et illustré, Paris, 1965, volume III, no. 1686, pp. 166-167, illustrated.

The work was also examined and authenticated by Martin Dieterle in 2002.

In 1854, Corot visited Holland with his friend and fellow painter Constant Dutilleux. Their two-month sketching trip was meticulously recorded by Dutilleus in his journals. Rotterdam was one city that Corot revisited in September of that same year, painting on the banks of the Meuse.

Corot's Souvenir paintings are widely acknowledged as some of his most moving and deeply poetic works. Painted in the early 1860s, almost ten years after his trip to Holland, Souvenir de la Rotte près Rotterdam draws from both the artist's sketches and memories of his visits to Rotterdam as well as his creative imagination. Both the sailboats and the Dutch-style fishing cottages in the distance are motifs taken directly from first-hand observation, while the twilight sky seen through the dense foliage flanking the river create the atmosphere of a world lit by the setting sun.

In the present work, Corot captures perfectly the moment of crepuscule when the land is bathed in half-light and the sky still retains the beauty, light and colour of the already set sun. Two boats carrying figures emerge from the depths of shadows in the marshy inlet in the darkening foreground. The depth of the landscape is deftly created by the placement of these figures; one in the foreground, one in the middle ground, and then the artist defines the furthest reaches of the landscape by the inclusion of the sailboats and a row of houses on the edge of the river. There is a serenity that pervades the composition and the viewer is invited into a world coloured only by the light of the end of the day.

It would be fallacy to try to situate Corot's landscapes too precisely and would only serve to misrepresent the artist's poetic vision. These wonderfully atmospheric landscapes represent the artist's meditations in nature and were never meant to portray accurate depictions rooted in time and place. Always lyrical in feel, these are reflections loosely analogous to French Romantic poetry, such as the work of Althonse de Lamartine or Alfred de Musset.