Jean‐Baptiste‐Camille Corot 1796–1875
NG 6339 
Dardagny, Morning

Sarah Herring, 2019

Extracted from:
Sarah Herring, The Nineteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2019).

1853

Oil on canvas, 26 × 47 cm

Support

The canvas is loose‐lined and the stretcher is new. The tacking edges are present all round. Paint is present on the tacking edges on all but the left side, which may indicate a reduction in size. The number ‘2302’, followed by what may be ‘bo’ over ‘2’ (expressed as a fraction) was inscribed on the original strainer.

Materials and Technique

The ground is white, consisting of a mixture of lead white and chalk. Cobalt blue and lead white are present in the sky. These two pigments were also used for the distant mountains, with the addition of a bright red to create the purplish hue. A mixture of Prussian blue with chrome yellow was found predominantly in the green paint passages.¹ Some of these passages of paint have fairly complex mixtures, since red and yellow earth pigments, ivory black and vermilion were also present in small amounts in most of the yellow to green paint mixtures.

Medium analysis revealed that Corot painted his blue hills and green grass with non‐prepolymerised linseed oil.

NG 6339 is thinly painted throughout, with the canvas weave showing through in many places. In areas Corot added a thicker layer of paint, as in the cornfields, which have an initial lay‐in of thin, dull mustard yellow, and a second, partial layer of brighter yellow. These shades were created with varying combinations of pigments such as chrome yellow, cadmium yellow, lead white, cobalt blue, ivory black, vermilion and earth pigments. This is a relatively early example of cadmium yellow, a bright opaque pigment available to artists from the mid‐1840s.

The hills are very smoothly painted, with the sky following, and occasionally overlapping their contours. The blue strokes of the sky also follow the contours of the clouds, suggesting that they were painted first, with thicker white paint added over the thinner grey.

Martin Davies notes traces of a possible signature bottom left but on further examination it was concluded that no signature was present.²

Conservation and Condition

NG 6339 was cleaned and restored by the National Gallery in 1993, at which point it was taken off the old strainer. Although the original paint layers are thin, there is additional abrasion of the paint surface.

Discussion

A woman holding a long stick, dressed in a long dark dress and yellow straw hat, her face featureless, stands next to a cow on the path. The path, bordered with grassy verges and the occasional tree, meanders into the distance. Long shadows are cast by the bushes and tree on the left.³ On either side the fields are yellow, full of ripe corn, and in the background the blue hills of the Jura descend from left to right. The pale blue sky is dotted with small white and grey clouds.

The view is in the vicinity of Dardagny, a village in Switzerland about 16 km west of Geneva, and was painted during one of Corot’s visits to the country. His maternal grandfather was originally from the region of Fribourg, and it was perhaps these Swiss origins that drew Corot to visit Switzerland more than any other country in Europe, beginning with a stay in Lausanne in 1825 on his way to Italy. In 1852 he visited in the company of, among others, Daubigny and Armand Leleux (1818–1885).⁴ In 1853 he returned with Daubigny and was invited to stay in Dardagny with Leleux’s parents‐in‐law, Jacques and Elise Giraud. During this visit he completed a decorative screen that had been begun by Daubigny and Leleux in 1852.⁵ Corot also visited Switzerland in 1855, 1857 and 1859. On all three visits it is probable but not certain that he visited Dardagny. He returned to the village on his final trip to the country in 1863.

Robaut states that this work was a study painted in the company of Daubigny and Armand Leleux in the decade 1850–60. It seems reasonable to date it to 1853, the year in which Daubigny, Leleux and Corot are documented as being at Dardagny,⁶ and the ripening cornfields on either side of the road correlate to Corot’s stay in July and August. The fluidity of the brushwork and speed of execution suggest that the work was at least begun en plein air, with details such as the woman and cow perhaps added later.

John House recently classed NG 6339 as a ‘dealer picture’, paintings considered by Corot as being worthy of sale. Unlike pure études, such pictures are characterised by their carefully considered compositions.⁷ The composition has also recently been linked with a rare wash ink drawing, Woman in a Landscape (fig. 1), which depicts the woman on the path from a slightly different viewpoint.⁸ From a sketchbook, the drawing has been seen as a first setting down of the figure in the landscape, and Corot would have used it when he added the figure to the painting itself.

Among Corot’s acquaintances in Switzerland were [page 99] [page 100] Suzanne Turrettini‐Necker (1814–1888), a pupil of Alexandre Calame and Barthélemy Menn (1815–1893), and her brother Charles Turrettini (1782–1857), whom he visited at Chênes and Cologny.⁹ Baud‐Bovy writes of Corot’s first meeting with Suzanne, and of his habit of lending his sketches to her, which at some point included NG 6339.¹⁰ He mentions what is probably NG 6339 among copies he was shown by M. Louis Perrot: ‘Another nephew of this last named, M. Louis Perrot, from Chambésy, from whom I hold the details of this meeting, has shown me excellent copies made by her of these studies … “The road at Dardagny”’. Baud‐Bovy gives no date for this.¹¹ But if the date of the loan and copies are not evident, it is certainly clear that Suzanne Turrettini‐Necker still had the pictures in 1859, as on 6 November of that year Corot wrote to Mme Darier asking for her help in recovering these sketches: ‘If you could tell Menn that it would be very kind of him to ask Mlle Tintine [Turrettini] again for those studies back, and also Berthoud, from Lausanne, who has one, and Scheffer.’¹² Turrettini’s copy has recently been located in a private collection in Switzerland (fig. 2).

Provenance

According to Robaut NG 6339 was in the collection of Emile Duhousset (1823–1911), a lieutenant‐colonel in the infantry, painter and sculptor who was passionate about horses and their representation in art;¹³ in December 1944 in the collection of Rudolph Ernst Brandt (1874–1961) of the banking family originating from Hamburg, who worked at the London branch of William Brandt’s Sons & Co.; presented in 1963 by William Edward Brandt (1897–1987), Henry Augustus Brandt (1902–1986), Walter Augustus Brandt (1902–1978) and Alice Mary Bleecker (1903–1984) in memory of Rudolph Ernst Brandt.¹⁴

Exhibitions

London 1963a (not numbered); London 2007–8 (not numbered); London 2009 (18 in accompanying book); Geneva 2010–11 (23).

Literature

Robaut 1905, II, p. 242, no. 720; Baud‐Bovy 1957, p. 144; Davies and Gould 1970, p. 34; Pomarède, Pantazzi and Tinterow 1996, p. 310 (French edn), p. 248 (English edn); Roy 1999, p. 340; V. Anker, ‘Corot in Svizzera’, in Pomarède 2005, pp. 108–9 (Italian edn only).

Copies and Engravings

• (1) Copy by Suzanne Turrettini‐Necker, private collection, Switzerland.¹⁵
• (2) Variant by Barthelémy Menn, Landscape with a Figure, after Corot (fig. 3).¹⁶

Notes