Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille (1796-1875)
Souvenir de Coubron (Souvenir of Coubron)
1872
Oil on canvas, 46.4 x 55.7 cm
Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest
In the wake of the Paris Commune (1871), Corot visited a friend of his in Coubron, a doctor, with whom he stayed for some time. An admirer of the Italian landscape, Corot was fond of this hamlet near Paris; he found poetry in the woodlands by the village, and the small stream, and created a true Arcadia there for himself.
He painted five landscapes during excursions in 1872, including this masterpiece, which Elek Petrovics, the newly appointed director of the Museum of Fine Arts, purchased for the museum’s collection at the start of the First World War. Petrovics, and the curator Simon Meller, bought the painting in the knowledge that the museum was soon likely to acquire Camille Pissarro’s early landscape La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire from the collection of painter and art collector Ferenc Hatvany. These two works, along with a Boudin landscape, clearly illustrate how the depiction of light and atmosphere led to the mature impressionist style.
Corot’s vaporous technique makes his Coubron paintings particularly attractive. Lightness of being floats above the landscape, while the village lies quietly hidden in the distance. The village was presumably left unscathed by internal political events in France, the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath. However, the advances of civilisation gradually infiltrated into everyday rural life. Urban and village architecture was foregrounded in painting, while questions concerning the representation of nature were relegated to the background. Judit Geskó (MNG)