Girl Weaving a Garland
1860–65
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in. (41.9 x 29.8 cm)
Classification
Paintings
Department
European Paintings
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929
Accession Number
29.100.562
Tags
Art Historical Context
Camille Corot's *Girl Weaving a Garland (1860–65), a delicate oil on canvas measuring just 16½ × 11¾ inches, captures a serene moment of rural innocence. Painted during the artist's mature years, it depicts a young girl absorbed in crafting a floral garland, evoking the timeless poetry of everyday life in the French countryside. Corot, a master of the Barbizon school, blended Romantic lyricism with emerging Realist tendencies, paving the way for Impressionism his masterful handling of light and atmosphere. This intimate-scale work exemplifies Corot's late style, where soft, diffused lighting ...
About the Artist
Camille Corot · 1796–1875
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, born in Paris on July 16, 1796, into a prosperous bourgeois family—his father a former wig maker turned draper, his mother a successful milliner—initially resisted his artistic calling. After a lackluster education at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen and failed apprenticeships in business, he abandoned commerce at age 26, thanks to a generous parental allowance foll...