Footnotes

Provenance
M. Goupil, Paris, 1876.
Gustav Miesegaes, New York, 1955.
With Newhouse Galleries, New York, 1955.
Private American collection, 1955-1983.
With Newhouse Galleries, New York, November 1983.
Private collection, USA (acquired directly from the above in 1983).

Literature
Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre de Corot, catalogue raisonné et illustré, Paris, 1965, volume III, no. 1844, p. 204, illustrated.

This is not a landscape painter, this is the very poet of the landscape, who breathes the sadness and joys of nature. The bond, the great bond that makes us as brothers of the rocks and trees, he sees it; his figures, as poetic as his forests, are not strangers to the woodlands that surround them. He knows more than anyone, he has discovered all the customs of the boughs and leaves, and now that he is sure he will not distort their inner life, he can dispense with all servile imitation
(Theodore de Banville, 'Le Salon de 1861', Revue fantaisiste 2, 1861, pp. 235-236.)

Dating from 1865-1870, Souvenir de Voisinlieu was painted during the most creative and successful period in Corot's career. During this five year period, Corot perfected the misty, often idyllic pastoral landscapes for which he became so revered. Corot was considered to be the leading landscape painter of his time, and the present work is an example not only of his innate ability to capture his local environs, but also his ability to translate onto his canvas the atmospheric effects of any given time of day.

In the present work, Corot proves himself once again to be the perfect 'poet of the landscape'. The motif of boatmen on a placid body of water arched by trees recurs often in the paintings of Corot's later career. Here, a boatman ferries two women slowly to shore on a sunny afternoon. The light of the sky lends a velvety texture to the trees and the surface of the river reflects the blue of the sky, the whites of the clouds and the stone facades of the buildings lining the shore in the middle ground. In the far distance, through the gap in the trees on the right hand side of the composition, one can glimpse the outlines of a distant town.

The red-hatted boatman is probably the most ubiquitous staffage figure in Corot's later oeuvre. One scholar counted over forty works in which he appears, his hat providing a strong note of colour to complement the verdant foreground of the painting.