Italian Woman (La Morieri)
c. 1872
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 65.2 × 55.1 cm (25 11/16 × 21 11/16 in.) framed: 94.9 x 84.5 x 11.4 cm (37 3/8 x 33 1/4 x 4 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Department
CF
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of the Avalon Foundation
Accession Number
1954.6.1
Art Historical Context
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Cor, a leading French landscape painter of the Barbizon School and precursor to Impressionism, created *Italian Woman (La Mor)* around 1872, late in his prolific career. This intimate oil on canvas portrait measures 65.2 × 55.1 cm and captures a poised female figure, evoking the idealized beauty Corot admired during his multiple travels to Italy in the 1820s 1850s. Though painted from memory decades later, it reflects his enduring fascination with Italian subjects, blending realism with poetic reverie. Corot's masterful use of oil on canvas allowed for his signature soft...
About the Artist
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, born on July 16, 1796, in Paris to a prosperous bourgeois family—his father a former wig-maker turned draper and his mother a successful milliner—was initially apprenticed in the textile trade but pursued art from his mid-twenties with family support. He studied under the neoclassical landscapist Achille Etna Michallon in 1821–1822, who taught him to sketch outdoors in...