Jean‐Baptiste‐Camille Corot 1796–1875
NG 6651–6654 
The Four Times of Day: Morning, Noon, Evening, Night

Sarah Herring, 2019

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

c. 1858

Oil on wood (probably cherry)¹

Support ²

The support of each picture is a composite, made of two panels; a slightly smaller panel is stuck down on to a larger panel, which would have formed a simple relief decoration of raised flat panels and surrounding shallow borders of about 13 mm wide. The detailed dimensions of the individual panels are as follows:

• Morning: lower panel 142.7 (at right) and 142.5 (at left) × 72.6 (at bottom) and 72.3 (at top) cm; upper panel 140 × 69.5 (at bottom) and 69.8 (at top) cm.
• Noon: lower panel 142.7 (at left) and 142.5 (at right) × 62.4 (at bottom) and 62.3 (at top) cm; upper panel 141 (at left) and 140.7 (at right) × 59.3 cm.
• Evening: lower panel 142.6 (at left) and 142.5 (at right) × 71.5 (at bottom) and 71.6 (at top) cm; upper panel 140.5 × 68.6 cm.
• Night: lower panel 142.6 (at left) and 142.2 (at right) × 64.1 (at bottom) and 63.8 (at top) cm; upper panel 139.6 (at left) and 140 (at right) × 61.4 (at bottom) and 61.8 (at top) cm.

A whitish material that has squeezed out between the upper and lower panels in certain areas (for example on the right vertical edge of Noon) is probably an excess of the glue used to adhere the panels together. The panels have been thinned and the reverses are largely obscured by cradles, a procedure carried out at a later date.³

Each panel is made up of narrow vertical boards, four on average for both the upper and lower panels, five for the front panel of Noon (fig. 1).⁴ The fourth board of this last has two horizontal cuts or breaks, either because it was originally one board cut into three, or because it was composed of three separate pieces. The boards are bound together by tongue‐and‐groove joins of the type commonly used by cabinetmakers (as visible, for example, on the top edge of Morning, fig. 3). The quality of the wood is relatively poor, with prominent wood grain and numerous knots throughout. The panel for Evening has several areas of wild grain. The surface of each panel was improved by the filling of the knots. All the panels have a double ground, presumably applied by Corot in an attempt to even out the surface, consisting of an off‐white underlayer of lead white extended with chalk and barium sulphate, tinted with some fine black, and an upper, brighter and more opaque layer made up almost entirely of lead white with a very small amount of black. The binding medium of this upper ground layer was found to be heat‐bodied walnut oil.⁵ In the X‐radiograph a thick white line visible at the junction of the panels represents where the priming has gathered in the joins. The priming also extends over the shallow border as visible in samples taken from Morning, Noon, and Evening. Despite these priming layers, the surface remains very uneven.

There are three rows of damage on Noon and Evening, each of which consists of four holes, formerly containing screw heads covered with a fill material (fig. 2); these were almost certainly attachment points for a secondary support such as a batten, which was subsequently removed (for a more detailed discussion of which see below). In addition, all four panels have randomly positioned nail holes. Morning and Evening have broken remains of putty around the inner edges of the borders, on top of the distemper and priming layers, the implications of which are discussed below in relation to Lord Leighton’s ownership of the panels.

The outer shallow border of each panel has a layer of light grey‐blue paint, revealed by samples to be a form of distemper, made up principally of off‐white chalk with some charcoal black and a little red earth (fig. 4). In samples taken from Morning and Evening there is a second chalky layer, with a very thin intermediary layer of glue size. A cross‐section from Morning, for example, shows the following layers: mid‐grey paint; a thin, non‐pigmented layer which is possibly glue size; a thin chalk preparation layer; and the two ground layers, indicating that in the application of the priming layers Corot (or whoever applied them) went

Morning (NG 6651)

142.7 × 72.6 cm

Signed bottom left in buff paint: COROT

Noon (NG 6652)

142.7 × 62.4 cm

Signed bottom right in black paint: COROT

[page 115]

Evening (NG 6653)

142.6 × 71.6 cm

Signed bottom left in buff paint: COROT

Night (NG 6654)

142.6 × 64.1 cm

Signed bottom right in buff paint: COROT

over the border. While limited sampling has meant that the information gained from cross‐section analysis is not wholly conclusive, it is assumed that the grey‐blue distemper probably does extend over the whole panel surface and represents the original coating of the panelling.⁶ Corot painted over the border in a number of places: this is most evident in Morning, where some of the thin brown paint goes over the border at the lower left (further up the panel the brush appears to jump, leaving a strip of white), and at the top right the tree extends beyond the border.

Interior Panelling

Elements outlined above, including the make‐up of the panels and their tall format, the quality of the wood used, the rows of screw‐holes, the borders and the pale grey distemper, all indicate that these panels were components of panelling used for interior decoration. Panelling was first used in interiors in Antiquity. While it was initially valued for its ability to maintain temperature, it also offered decorative opportunities that were increasingly exploited, reaching their apogee in the eighteenth century.⁷ The reign of Louis XV (1715–1774) saw the golden age of decorative panelling in France, during which it was installed in every residence of distinction. Walls would be divided, with smaller rows of panelling near the floor, above which would be hung tall panels of varying widths, some left relatively plain, others ornamented with intricate carving in wood or mouldings made from papier mâché or plaster of Paris. Painted decoration was also a feature of panelled rooms, either on separate panels or pieces of canvas and set, for example over doors or chimneypieces, or painted directly on the panelling itself, as in paintings by Christophe Huet (1700–1759), Dutour and Crépin in the ‘cabinet des singes’, hôtel de Rohan‐Strasbourg, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris. After the Revolution panelling was increasingly replaced by wallpaper and fabric, and where panelling was put in, for reasons of economy it often only covered the lower part of the walls. There are still examples of panelling installed throughout the nineteenth century, however: Valtesse de la Bigne (1848–1910), for example, chose the eighteenth‐century style for her hotel built in 1873–6 at 98 boulevard Malesherbes, with the walls and ceiling of her dining room panelled in old oak.⁸

If the panels are of cherry, this is an unusual choice. While chestnut, lime and pine were all used for panelling, the most common, particularly for expensive schemes, was oak.⁹ The shallow, plain border, devoid of any bevelling of the panels on which Corot painted, is of a very basic form. This can be related to the simplest profile (‘fig. 3’) in plate 59 of André‐Jacob Roubo’s The Art of the Woodworker (1769–75), an important source for eighteenth‐century interior panelling (fig. 5).¹⁰ Roubo’s plate also shows how planks were joined for interior panelling by tongue and groove, and the use of reinforcing battens across the backs of certain panels.¹¹ As described above, Noon and Evening have rows of holes for the attachment of such battens, presumably necessary because of the poor quality of the component wooden boards (which make up these panels). The randomly positioned nail holes relate to their attachment to the wall.

The Painted Border

Distemper was used extensively in eighteenth‐century interior decoration, including on panelling.¹² While Jean Félix Watin in his L’Art du peintre, dorure et vernisseur (first published 1772) calls distemper ‘surely the oldest method of painting’ (‘sûrement la plus ancienne manière de peindre’), a water‐based paint designed particularly for interior panelling (which had hitherto used oil‐based paint) was apparently invented in 1757 by Dandrillon, as reported in the Mercure de France on 1 June 1757: devoid of any hint of odour, since it employs neither oil, nor wax, nor any kind of varnish; but one which preserves the secret of imparting to the colours he uses to decorate interiors, both the polish of the Chipolins used up until now and the gloss of the finest varnishes.¹³ [page 117] This new distemper paint was approved by the Académie Royale d’Architecture. There were three types of distemper, la détrempe commune (common distemper); la détrempe vernie (varnished distemper) or chipolin, which was applied in seven layers and then varnished; and le blanc de roi (the king’s white), again applied in multiple layers, requiring the most expensive pigments and often combined with gilding.¹⁴ The distemper used here, composed of cheap materials, chalk and small amounts of charcoal and red earth, is of the first type, as described by Watin for use in less refined panelling: ‘common distemper is the one used for rough work not requiring a lot of care, and which doesn’t demand any preparation, such as ceilings, floorboards, and staircases’.¹⁵

It was the fashion in the eighteenth century to paint panelling in pale colours.¹⁶ From 1750 onwards white became more popular, with added gilding in the more important or ceremonial rooms of grand houses, and much coloured panelling was repainted white. Private rooms, however, tended to be left coloured.¹⁷ Popular colours included pale tones of green, yellow, blue, lilac and grey, with borders and sculptured details picked out in different colours. Light greys were popular in rooms that received full sunlight.¹⁸ Various greys used included silver grey, pearl grey, flax grey and ordinary grey. That on these panels, composed simply of chalk and black, is the last, a gris ordinaire (the few particles of red earth pigment may be an accidental addition). Very little panelling has survived from this period with its original paint intact, the result of both daily wear and changes in taste. Interior paint suffered greatly due to environmental conditions such as fires and sunlight, and the secondary layer of chalk present in samples from Morning and Evening, white rather than grey, almost certainly represents a freshening up of the first decoration.¹⁹ An intermediary glue size layer also present would have been applied to help the second, chalky layer adhere.

The different factors outlined here, the rough, poor quality wood, the simple crude profile and the common distemper of an ordinary grey, made up of cheap materials, all point to the panels originating from a humble setting rather than a grand ceremonial room, and it is probable that they originally formed part of a simple scheme, perhaps interspersed with tall, narrow panels or parcloses (for which see further discussion below).

Materials and Technique

Analysis of the original brown paint of the large rock on the left‐hand side that extends over the grey‐blue border in Morning consists of red, yellow and brown earth pigments (including umber), vermilion, and some Prussian blue. Zinc was also detected as an element within this layer and, although it may be evidence of the presence of zinc white as a pigment in itself it is more likely to relate to the manufacture of nineteenth‐century Prussian blue (also present within this paint mixture), whereby zinc white was added to the blue pigment in order to alter its optical properties.²⁰ In Noon the sky is painted in a single layer of lead white and cobalt blue with a little added yellow (probably yellow earth). The green foliage of the tree on the far right was painted with a brownish‐green mixture of red, yellow and brown earth, vermilion and Prussian blue. A fair amount of zinc is also present in this layer, again possibly relating to the manufacture of Prussian blue. In Evening the sky was painted with a mixture of zinc white, cobalt blue and vermilion and the brighter green foliage on the trees on the left with mixtures containing green earth, a little yellow earth, vermilion, Prussian blue and zinc white (possibly also, as above, a component of the Prussian blue paint). In Night the dark blue sky comprises a mixture of lead white, Prussian blue and some earth pigments with the addition of zinc white (again either as a stand‐alone pigment or as a component of the Prussian blue paint). The dark brownish‐green foliage on the left of Night was created with mixtures of red and yellow earth, ivory black with some lead and zinc white painted over the top of the dark blue. In a sample taken from foliage half‐way down the left‐hand edge there is an additional layer of dark brownish‐green paint, presumably representing foliage, consisting of red and yellow earth, ivory black with some lead and zinc white over the sky paint.

The medium used for the sky paint of Noon, Evening and Night was identified as walnut oil. No medium analysis was carried out on the sky paint from Morning, although walnut oil also appears to be the binder used for the brown foliage paint here.²¹

The painting technique is very broad and direct: a sketchy brown ébauche, elaborated with more opaque paints, is visible throughout, especially in the foregrounds. In Morning this is overlaid in the foreground with equally thin brushstrokes in dark olive green. The trees, which are mostly composed of brown with touches of a dull green, appear to be painted directly on to the ground as very little ébauche is visible and the thicker beige paint lies over a creamy colour. The tree trunk at the extreme right is painted most perfunctorily, on top of the sky paint, with some reinforcing of the sky paint at the edges. The tower or rock is very vague in outline. While the underpaint is again visible in the foreground and through the trees of Noon, this panel is in general more highly worked. The trunks and main bodies of the trees are sketched in first and the strong blue paint of the sky brought down and around the trees and branches. A fluid brown is used for some branches added at a later stage and a thin, dark olive paint is used in the foreground vegetation. The figures were painted last. Evening is the most highly worked of the four panels, with less underpaint visible. Again the blue of the sky is painted around the trees and added over the foliage. Fairly thick impasto is used in areas, such as the small but thickly painted white cloud at the centre; the trees are also more highly worked and thickly painted. The thin brown underpaint is again a feature of the foreground in Night, lighter at the centre where a path is depicted (fig. 6). The dark blue sky is painted directly onto the ground. The figure and his dog are painted in thin, dark brown paint, the dog [page 118] appearing simply as a brown silhouette. Of the stars in the sky, some are scratched out in the blue paint, others added with white paint. Corot has used the handle end of his brush to scratch out branches in Noon – on either side of the tree trunk, the grasses at the bottom of the tree trunk and on the other side of the path (fig. 7). He also used the end of his brush to draw a line to the left of the trunk of the tree on the far left in Morning.

The loose, confident handling is also a feature of Corot’s other decorative schemes. Two later schemes (for which see below), painted for Nicolas Fournier and Mme Castaignet (for the latter see figs 19, 20), are both pairings of mornings contrasted with evenings.²² All four paintings feature thinly painted foregrounds, with the brown ébauche visible. Of the Castaignet paintings, Evening is particularly thinly painted, with every brushstroke visible. The thin brown ébauche can be seen in the foreground, with numerous scratchings‐out made by the end of the brush; the trees are more heavily worked at the top. In general Morning is more highly finished, although the sky is thin, as is the foreground, again with scratching with the end of the brush. Of the Fournier paintings the evening scene is again more thinly painted, the morning scene more solidly so, featuring a dark bank of imposing trees.

Conservation and Condition

The panels have all been thinned and cradled, presumably after they were removed from Decamps’s studio. Many of the panel joins show signs of having been taken apart and re‐joined (perhaps in association with the cradling process). All four panels have some small splits (with Evening having the most). There are bands of retouching along the repairs, from 2–3 mm on Morning to wider bands of 1–1.5 cm in the foregrounds of Noon and Evening.

Apart from damages associated with the panel repairs, the paint surface is generally in very good condition; passages of old, discoloured retouchings were adjusted in June 2016. Areas of the ébauche left exposed by the artist appear to have suffered some abrasion in parts (particularly in Evening).

Discussion

The panels, depicting four different landscapes, trace the day’s progress from glowing dawn to starry night. Each scene is framed on both sides by tall, graceful trees. In Morning the two substantial trunks on the left are offset by two rather delicate specimens on the right; the composition is reversed in Noon, with the more spindly trunks set on the left and slightly further back, and the clump of fuller‐leafed trees (but also including some characteristic bare trunks) at the right on a grassy bank around which the path curves. In Evening the thicker clump of trees appears on the left, with the thinner trunks on the right, and in Night one slender trunk is positioned on the left and a thicker clump of slender trees is on the right. Both Noon and Night have paths leading the eye into the landscape. Morning and Evening (which are wider) are signed on the left, Noon and Night on the right.

The sky of Morning is pale blue with a creamy orange glow added at the horizon with fairly thick paint. There are a couple of bright orange streaks between the tree trunks to the left, and further strokes of lighter orange mixed with cream are dotted in the sky. In Noon the colour of the sky deepens from a pale blue at the horizon to a stronger blue at the top. Similarly, in both Evening and Night the skies deepen from light blue at the horizon to a deeper blue in the heavens, with scattered white clouds gradually turning greyer higher up in the former, while in the latter darker blue clouds have been added at the top, with a sprinkling of white stars. In Morning the light is coming from the back and right; in Noon, with the sun high in the sky, it is diffuse and even; and in Evening the light emanates from the left.

Morning features a blocky structure at the left; although Robaut, in his manuscript notes, calls it ‘La Tour d’Henri VIII’, ‘au pied des anciens remparts à Tournai’, it is almost certainly a massive rock.²³ On the right a figure in a red hat holds a stick in one hand and raises the other to the tree trunk in an attitude reminiscent of women throughout Corot’s work shown reaching into (and at times appearing to gather from) trees, of which perhaps the most famous example is Souvenir of Mortefontaine (Paris, Louvre), exhibited by the [page [120]] artist at the Salon of 1864.²⁴ Conjured from a few fluid strokes, the figure’s features are not delineated. Perhaps this is a goatherd: at the centre are two goats, the nearer one, almost transparent, outlined with a few strokes of cream paint, the farther one more substantial.

In Noon there are three figures. A man in a red hat in the foreground rests his foot on a rock, adjusting his laces: Robaut’s manuscript title is ‘Paysan rattachant la guêtre’ (‘farmer retying his gaiters’).²⁵ He is more highly worked than the figure in Morning and has been given facial features. Further back, a couple walks along the path, the man painted as facing the viewer but the woman appearing to be depicted from the back.

Evening features two women in a boat, one sitting, in a white‐pink dress, the other standing, wearing white with a yellow shawl and red hat, carrying what seems to be a mandolin. The clothing, setting and hint of music give the scene the air of a fête galante. Corot gave his models mandolins to hold (although not in a position for playing, as here, but trailing from their fingers or resting on a knee) from his earliest studies made during his first trip to Italy in 1825–8, such as Seated Woman holding a Mandolin.²⁶ Mandolins also appear in a number of his later studies of women, including The Artist’s Studio (about 1870–2; collection of Spencer and Marlene Hays)²⁷ and The Artist’s Studio (about 1865; Paris, Musée d’Orsay).²⁸ Corot famously loved music, but in many ways he treated the mandolins as props in the same manner as the books held by many of his models (Silvestre writes on how Corot, who did not read, would buy books ‘exclusively for their shapes and colours’ for his models to hold).²⁹ On the bank a mysterious monk‐like figure (called a ‘philosopher’ by Robaut) turns away from the boat.³⁰ He carries a staff in one hand and wears what appears to be a Capuchin habit, although without an obvious hood. The lower half of his indistinct face is in shadow; an incongruous black hat or scarf around his head is streaked with red, perhaps the remains of paint on the artist’s brush from the red hat of the standing woman. Corot’s first depiction of a monk, Seated Italian Monk, reading (1826–8; Buffalo, Albright‐Knox Gallery),³¹ dated from his first trip to Italy; the figure was to reappear frequently in his work throughout his career. In the 1850s he painted a series of similar figures, reading or meditating, based on the Italian study. Most of his later monks wear dark Capuchin robes, with a few wearing light Carthusian robes.

In Night a figure in a red cap, his head bowed, makes his way down the path with his dog at his side. As well as the most Romantic of the panels, with its evocation of homecoming, this is also the one most imbued with the spirit of Italy, with an Italianate village clinging to the hillside in the background. The dark blue sky is dotted with touches of white paint and the moon shines out over the topmost house.³² In his manuscript notes Robaut gives this panel the title ‘Chevrier de Civitella Décoratif à Fontainebleau’ (‘Goatherd at Civitella Decoration in Fontainebleau’).

Related Work

The composition of Night is very similar to that of the considerably smaller Moonlight at the Edge of a Bay (fig. 9).³³ The moon shines through the branches of a tall, graceful tree grouped with others on the left side (in fuller leaf than those in Night). A lone figure in a red cap walks along a path leading to the foreground. In the left background an Italianate village descends the hillside, with one prominent lighted window in the highest house. The sky darkens from light blue at the horizon to dark grey at the top.

Such nocturnal views are rarities in Corot’s work, of which there exist only a handful, notably Moonlit Landscape, which he exhibited at the Salon of 1874 alongside a morning scene, Souvenir of Arleux‐du‐Nord, and Evening.³⁴

The Subject

The framing device of tall trees on either side of each panel derives ultimately from a classical landscape tradition that evolved in the seventeenth century, in which landscapes were conceived as settings for characters from history, mythology or the Bible, the foreground space framed by trees or architecture.³⁵ Claude Gellée (1604/5?–1682) in particular excelled in such compositions, of which Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (fig. 10) is a supreme example, with its vertical format and trees (more substantial at the right) framing the central figures and bleeding off on each side, and an extensive landscape opening out in the background. Claude was of immense importance in Corot’s own development as an artist, particularly in his compositions and attitude to light.³⁶ An early biographer, Joachim Sandrart, recorded how Claude attempted ‘by every means to penetrate nature, lying in the fields before the break of day and until night in order to learn to represent very exactly the red morning sky, sunrise and sunset and the evening hours’.³⁷ He also used light to decorative and allegorical effect. Over a hundred of his paintings were conceived as pairings, often juxtaposing evening with morning. His morning scenes are often associated with new beginnings, particularly embarkations on voyages, with the source of light positioned on the left; in his evening scenes the sun is positioned on the right, associated with the end of the day, and people making music are frequently included.³⁸ In a pair dating from 1633, Coast View and Landscape with the Judgement of Paris (figs 11, 12) the former is shown at sunrise, with a cool tonality, and the latter at sunset, with a warm, pinkish light.³⁹

Claude’s concern with depicting the specific light effects of different times of the day was subsumed into a tradition of oil sketching in the open air, which was codified by Valenciennes in his Elémens de perspective pratique à l’usage des Artistes, suivis de Réflexions et Conseils à un Elève sur la Peinture, et particulièrement sur le genre de Paysage (1799–1800), where he devotes a section to the four times of day: morning, noon, evening and night. Here he both advises on the exact moments to capture when sketching out‐of‐doors (for example, he specifically advocates two hours after sunrise as the best morning moment) and suggests subjects for imaginary studio compositions suitable for certain times of the day: for noon, for example, he suggests subjects ranging from pastoral to mythological, from harvesters at their midday rest to the story of Phaeton.⁴⁰ Painting a variety of landscapes at different times of the day allowed the artist to present a greater range of effects. Thus Valenciennes notes the opportunity, in a series of paintings (as exemplified by Claude), to exploit and contrast the different light effects of each: [page 122] one finds … more decided contrasts, more pronounced oppositions, and more distinct effects at the instant determined for each division. The freshness of the morning would be better sensed next to the burning horizon of evening, and one would better appreciate the calm of night and the soft silver light of the moon in placing it in opposition to the heavy atmosphere and obliterating rays of the sun at noon.⁴¹ During a period of 17 days in March 1826 Corot painted three highly finished studies from the Palatine Hill in Rome, View in the Farnese Gardens (Washington, The Phillips Collection), View of the Colosseum from the Farnese Gardens (Paris, Louvre) and View of the Forum from the Farnese Gardens (Paris, Louvre), each worked on at different times of the day – morning, midday and late afternoon – and exhibiting different light conditions.⁴²

Like Claude, Corot also conceived paintings as pendants contrasting the light of morning with that of evening. His earliest is the pair shown at the Salon of 1827, View at Narni (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada) and The Roman Campagna (Zurich, Kunsthaus), the former a morning, sunlit view, the latter an evening stormy one.⁴³ He exhibited a further two ovals at the Salon of 1848, Evening and Morning,⁴⁴ and at the Exposition Universelle in 1867 he showed The Clearing at Daybreak and The Italian Shepherd, Evening Effect (as Morning and Evening).⁴⁵ For fellow artist Léon Fleury (1804–1858) he painted two ovals, Morning in the Valley (Souvenir of Italy) and Evening on the Edge of a Torrent (Souvenir of Italy) (1850–60).⁴⁶ The subject of morning and evening was also a common one in his decorative schemes, which were carried out for a number of patrons and fellow artists.

The formalised depiction of the times of day alluded to by Valenciennes as subjects for studio compositions was an elaborate and long‐established tradition. The focus was originally on personification and allegory, also linked to such other cyclical schemes as the seasons and ages of man, and often involving deities associated with, for example, dawn, night, the sun and moon. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a landscape tradition developed, particularly in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Germany, in which groups of landscapes at different times of the day, sometimes painted by different artists, were issued as sets of prints.⁴⁷ Although many of these depicted views, some imaginary, of Rome and its surroundings, [page [123]]artists also evoked their native landscape.⁴⁸ Much emphasis was given to light and shadow, as would be expected in an image destined for engraving. Such was the popularity of the theme right through the eighteenth century that Claude’s own series of four paintings with religious subjects in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Landscape with Tobias and the Angel, Landscape with Jacob Wrestling the Angel and Landscape with Jacob, Rachel and Leah at the Well, was titled The Four Times of the Day from 1783 onwards – described by Röthlisberger as a ‘romantic misnomer’.⁴⁹

For the most part these landscapes were amply populated by personages going about their daily tasks, often specifically engaged in activities appropriate to the time of day (as advised by Valenciennes). Thus in a Times of Day series by Nicolaes Berchem (1620–1682), for example, in Aurora, a peasant saddles a donkey in preparation for a journey. Such activities linked to the four times of day are related to the parallel development of a genre in which daily tasks are the dominant subject.⁵⁰ This subject, along with the senses, the seasons and the elements, was popular in decorative schemes in the eighteenth century. A great exponent of these was Claude‐Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), who created a series of schemes for private individuals, such as The Times of Day painted in 1766–7 for the billiard room of the marquis de Laborde.⁵¹ Vernet often depicted storm scenes at noon, an otherwise monotonous time of day with even light conditions.⁵²

Corot’s panels emphasise the play of light on the landscape at different moments in the daily cycle rather than the activities of the figures. While they could be said to have their roots in the tradition, which had evolved from the seventeenth century, of depicting the times of day, they also evolved from the classical and ideal landscape as exemplified by Claude. For Corot the depiction of the landscape was always of paramount importance, but the slight disjunction between his times of day and the activities of his figures is perhaps also indicative of the period in which he was painting. In the nineteenth century the popularity of the subject of the times of day declined and by the 1850s it was outdated. But the concern with depicting landscape under certain light conditions continued with the Impressionists, reaching its logical conclusion in such series paintings as Monet’s haystacks shown at different times of the day and under different skies.⁵³

The panels situated in Corot’s other decorative work

Corot’s earliest decorative scheme was painted for the living room (‘le Salon Pompadour’) of an apartment shared by Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855), Camille Rogier (1810–1896) and Arsène Houssaye (1815–1896) in the impasse du Doyenné near the Palais du Louvre. He and a group of other artists, including Adolphe Leleux, Célestin Nanteuil (1813–1873), Théodore Chassérieu (1819–1856), Prosper Marilhat and Théodore Rousseau, were commissioned to decorate the room in preparation for a ball, the ‘Bal des Truands’ in 1834 or 1835, according to Houssaye painting directly onto the ‘white panelling outlined with gold’ (‘le panneau blanc encadré d’or’).⁵⁴ The building was destroyed in 1853 but Gérard de Nerval saved some of the panels, buying from the demolishers ‘two lots of panelling’, including Corot’s ‘two long panels representing two landscapes of Provence’, which he later took with him to Dr Blanche’s clinic.⁵⁵ Apart from two panels by Chassériau, all the other paintings have now disappeared.⁵⁶

From the 1840s to the 1860s Corot painted a number of further decorative schemes. These include the decorations for a bathroom for his friend François Parfait Robert (1814–1875), a magistrate at Mantes, painted about 1845 (Paris, Louvre): Souvenir of the Gulf of Genoa; Gorges in the Tyrol; The Lake of Nemi; Venice, the Grand Canal; Souvenir of the Countryside around Naples; and Rome.⁵⁷ Five of the subjects for this scheme were inspired by the artist’s second voyage to Italy, while Le Lac de Nemi was based on a study made on his third voyage.⁵⁸ In 1847 he decorated the Kiosque at Ville‐d’Avray with a series of landscapes based on the surrounding area and one showing members of the Corot family.⁵⁹ His other schemes created during this period include a series of oval decorations for the Bovy family in the château de Gruyères in Switzerland (fig. 14);⁶⁰ Morning on the Edge of a Lake (1855) and Sunset after the Storm (1856) for a small pavilion on the estate of Nicolas Fournier, Sauvigny‐les‐Beaune (both collection of Frank and Demi Rogozienski);⁶¹ four panels painted about 1855–65 (for a discussion of these dates see below) for the dining room of Léon Fleury’s house at Magny‐les‐Hameaux, Seine‐et‐Oise: The Dreamer in the Clearing (fig. 15) and The Young Shepherd on the Bank of a Torrent (fig. 16), Italian Villa behind Pine Trees (fig. 17) and The Fisherman (fig. 18);⁶² five panels (about 1864) for the hall of Daubigny’s house in Auvers: Island of Happiness (Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts), Don Quixote and Sancho (Cincinnati Art Museum), Willows, Morning, Clump of Trees, Evening and Horseman in a Gorge;⁶³ two panels for the dining room of Prince Paul Demidoff’s Paris mansion, begun in the Fontainebleau studio of Corot’s friend Philippe Comairas (1803–1875) in July 1865: Orpheus Greeting the Light (or Hymn to the Sun) (Madison, Chazen Museum of Art) and Diana Sleeping or Night (formerly New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art;⁶⁴ and for Mme [page 125] Castaignet at Montlhéry, Morning: Woman herding Cows and Evening: Tower in the Distance (figs 19, 20).⁶⁵ Corot also carried out decorations for churches. In 1855–6 he painted four panels for the church of Saint‐Nicolas‐Saint‐Marc, Ville‐d’Avray: Adam and Eve exiled from Paradise, The Baptism of Christ, Christ on the Mount of Olives and Mary Magdalene in the Desert.⁶⁶ In 1853–9 he painted 14 Stations of the Cross for the church of Saint‐Jean‐Baptiste et Saint‐Lubin, Rosny‐sur‐Seine.⁶⁷

Corot’s earliest surviving scheme, painted for François Parfait Robert in Mantes, while based very much on the actual sites in Italy, already features the vertical formats and tall framing trees that were to become a hallmark of his later decorations. Indeed, many of his schemes repeat elements and motifs. The composition of one of the Gruyères panels, The Rocky Ridge or The Woodcutter was reused for Noon, while the solitary figure seated under the tree in another, The Swiss Church Tower or The Little Tree, is of the type that [page 126] appears in the panels painted for Léon Fleury (see fig. 14). If the Swiss panels do not emphatically follow a sequence of the times of day, Corot chose to depict differing skies, from a blue sky tinged with pink in The Woodcutter to a sky deepening from the palest to a deep blue, overlaid with clouds shifting from gold and pink to dark grey in The Path in the Orchard or The Reader.

Perhaps the closest of all Corot’s decorative schemes to The Four Times of Day is the group of substantially larger panels painted for Fleury, generally dated to around 1855–65 (figs 15–18).⁶⁸ Meyer’s study of this series gives them a dating of the end of the 1850s on the evidence of a letter written by Corot from Magny‐les‐Hameaux in the summer or autumn of 1858.⁶⁹ This letter is cited by Moreau‐Nélaton as preceding Corot’s letter of 7 September regarding the double marriage of Constant Dutilleux’s two youngest daughters, written from Magny‐les‐Hameaux, where Fleury had ‘a rural house, a humble dwelling which had a feel of the country’.⁷⁰ Corot must have painted them before October of that year, in which month Fleury died. In The Young Shepherd on the Bank of a Torrent (known by the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna as Wooded Landscape (Evening)) (fig. 16) the trees on the right reach out into the picture and the clouds and the horizon are tinged with peachy‐cream paint. The sky is somewhat similar to that of Morning (NG 6561) but the dark trees, contrasted with the bright sky, are more brooding and oppressive, in keeping with the end of the day. The handling is extremely thin, more so than in any of the panels for Decamps, the trees painted in broad, sketchy strokes with a very few branches added on top and not as many touches of foliage as are usually seen in Corot’s work. The Dreamer in the Clearing (known in Vienna as Wooded Landscape (Morning)) (fig. 15) is framed on the left with a tall tree but the middle and left are dominated by a bank of trees, in front of which a ‘dreamer’ sits in a dark hollow. In the blue sky scratchy white clouds tinged with greys form bands. As with Evening, the handling is extremely sketchy with the trees formed of a mass of multi‐directional strokes in which all bristle lines are visible. Amost no branches have been added on top, and only a few touches of foliage in a pale olive‐green paint. There is scratching‐out with the end of brush in the foreground. Compositionally, Italian Villa behind Pine Trees can be related to Night. The scene is framed by a tall clump of trees on the right, balanced on the left by one single trunk; two figures wend their way along the path (a man with his red coat flung over his shoulder, a woman with her left arm stretched out to the side), while in the right background an Italianate villa perches on a hillside. The figures, as in Night, are sketched almost entirely in thin brown paint. The foreground is painted extremely thinly in brown with bold zigzag brushstrokes, and the sky progressively darkens to almost navy at the top. However, there are no stars or moon and generally the sky is much lighter than in NG 6654. The wider format of the panel (as with all the Fleury panels) allows for a more expansive landscape to unfold in the background, in this case rolling hills. The Fisherman features an even, diffuse light, the lake is bathed in light and the background hills are pearly, while the sky is of a light blue. Again the handling is broad, the paint thin, with zigzag strokes used in the foliage and scratching‐out with the end of the brush in the water at the left.

Meyer suggested that three of the Fleury panels could be described as ‘times of the day’, with the fourth The Fisherman, to be considered separately. He describes the two Vienna paintings, known by the museum at the time [page 127]of his writing as Wooded Landscape (Morning) and Wooded Landscape (Evening) respectively, as ‘Mittag’ (‘Noon’) and ‘Abend’ (‘Evening’). He identifies Italian Villa behind Pine Trees as depicting ‘Morning’, the shadows indicating a low sun, but notes that ‘Night’ does not feature, an omission he concludes is quite typical for Corot, who, as noted above, rarely painted night scenes.⁷¹ While acknowledging that the panels belong to the seventeenth‐century landscape tradition, adapted for decorative landscape, Meyer concludes that the subject matter of the Fleury panels must remain a supposition. And while all four show a concern with differing light effects it is not clear whether they were intended to show four times of the day.⁷²

Decamps, his Friendship with Corot and his Association with Fontainebleau

Both Corot and Decamps had a long association with the town of Fontainebleau and the surrounding forest. Corot made his first studies in the forest in 1822, while Decamps was installed at Chailly‐en‐Bière, a mile from Barbizon, by early 1844. According to Gassies, ‘Before coming to Fontainebleau, Decamps had been one of the guests of the Auberge du Cheval‐Blanc [White Horse] at Chailly, as can be seen in the couplet that concerns him in the famous Auberge Ganne lament [“complainte des Peint’ à Ganne”, 1846]’.⁷³
A painter of good temperament
Spends his days at Chailly
Barbizon is still asking
When Decamps will decamp
If he came to Barbizon
He would be the king of the bisons.⁷⁴ That Corot was a friend of Decamps and two further artists, Philippe Comairas and François‐Louis Français (1814–1897), and frequently dined with them, is shown by this anecdote on Corot’s relationship with his mother, related by a Swiss student, Léon Berthoud (1822–1892), in 1850: ‘he has to beg her repeatedly to get permission to go out to Saint‐Cloud for dinner every other Friday evening with Decamps, Français and Comairas, his great friends.’⁷⁵ Decamps was supposed to have painted a portrait of Corot, his closest ally.⁷⁶

While Decamps’s movements during the last decade of his life are not entirely clear, it is certain that he left Paris at the beginning of the 1850s and spent time both in the south‐west of France and in Fontainebleau. An inventory of his estate dated 18 March 1861, drawn up after his death following a riding accident on 22 August 1860, gives some details of his property purchases.⁷⁷ He bought a property in Veyrier (Le Verrier) north of Agen in the Lot‐et‐Garonne, south‐west France, on 5 December 1853, for 30,000 francs (presumably using the money he earned from his studio sale of 21–23 April 1853). He subsequently enlarged this property, and on 31 August 1857 he purchased another in neighbouring Tantare for 37,000 francs.⁷⁸ Decamps did not stay permanently in the south, however, and appears to have divided his time between Veyrier and Fontainebleau.⁷⁹ He also kept an apartment and studio in Paris. Chaumelin writes that the address he gave in his Salon ‘livret’ of 1855 was a studio in the Faubourg Saint‐Denis, and the 1861 inventory lists an apartment on the third floor of a house at 12 boulevard des Italiens, Paris.⁸⁰

The inventory includes the contract for his marriage on 16 July 1851 to Louise Joséphine Angeline Imbert (1818–1888).⁸¹ It also names her first husband as Jacques Faure and lists three surviving children, Louise Leonie (born 29 April 1842), Angèle Pauline (born 16 July 1845) and Léon (born 28 May 1846), ‘all three children issuing from the first marriage of Mme Decamps with M. Jacques Faure’ (‘tous trois enfants isons du premier mariage de Mme Decamps avec M. Jacques Faure’). They were subsequently adopted by Decamps.⁸² A fourth child, presumably the son of Decamps himself, Emmanuel Edmé, born 15 July 1850, died after accidently drinking vitriol (for which see below). The inventory states that when Decamps was married he had a property in Fontainebleau. While it does not give the address, it is likely that the house referred to is 26 rue Saint‐Merry, which had belonged to his mother, Edmée Jérôme Decamps, whose estate was divided between her two sons on 5 January 1850. Decamps took the house in the rue Saint‐Merry, then no. 8 and subsequently no. 26, when the numbering was changed. An early biographer, Moreau, described the property in the rue Saint‐Merry: ‘I have seen in turn this modest interior of the Porte‐Maillot, the provisional installation at the Hôtel de la Sirène, the pied‐à‐terre in the rue Saint‐Merry in Fontainebleau…’.⁸³ Decamps himself, in a letter of 26 January 1853 to Philippe Comairas, writes of his petite maison in Fontainebleau, which he intended to keep as a pied à terre.⁸⁴

Decamps invited Corot to this house in January 1856, for the Fête des Rois, his letter suggesting that such visits were frequent: ‘You always leave such a good memory that a preoccupation with seeing you again is the uppermost concern of our young girls’.⁸⁵ In June 1858 the Emperor and Empress visited Decamps in his studio in the rue Saint‐Merry.⁸⁶ It is not included in the 1861 inventory, and it is possible that it was either rented out or that he had already passed it to his daughter, Louise‐Léonie Faure‐Decamps, who married the publisher Edouard Dentu (1830–1884) in 1862. At the time of his death the artist Charles Edme Saint‐Marcel‐Cabin (1819–1890) was renting it from her.⁸⁷ Dentu’s obituary in L’Illustration suggests that artists who visited Decamps here would paint sketches on his walls: Dentu even owned and Mme Dentu still devoutly looks after the small house where Decamps shut himself up to work in the forest of Fontainebleau. At times Corot, Rousseau, Diaz came to join the Orientalist master, and each of them, in the manner of a visiting card, added to the door or the wall some stroke of the paintbrush. There are, without taking into account the unrecorded works by Decamps, unknown Corots in the painter’s small house.⁸⁸ This custom has echoes in the habit that had grown up among [page 128]artists visiting the area of decorating the local inns, including two in particular: Auberge du Cheval‐Blanc at Chailly and Auberge Ganne at Barbizon. The walls of the dining room in the former were covered with paintings left by artists, often in lieu of payment for meals. An article of 1854 by Pigeory describes the extensive decoration of the Auberge Ganne: an armoire (cupboard, wardrobe) in the salle des officiers with 12 panels painted by various artists, including Diaz; in the same room a landscape painted by Français on an overmantel, a landscape by Paul Huet, ‘Une percée de forêt’ on a cabinet in the Salle des Artistes.⁸⁹

Decamps’s Purchase of the House in the rue de France

The rue Saint‐Merry runs at right angles to the rue de France. In July 1858 Decamps bought a large former hotel, the Hôtel Britannique, at 108 rue de France, close to the crossroads de la Fourche; this became his home and studio. The house was built about 1825–30 and renovated at the end of the nineteenth century.⁹⁰ George Sand stayed there on two occasions, with Alfred de Musset (1810–1857) in 1833 and in July 1837 in the company of the comedian Paul Bocage (1824–1890), under the name of M. et Mme Gratiot.⁹¹ The inventory gives the date of its purchase by Decamps as 11 July 1858, the seller as baronne de Gentet, and the price as 33,000 francs, which confirms Victor Herbet’s statement published in 1898.⁹² Herbet also relates that the hotel was bought from Decamps’s heirs on 9 April 1864 by the baron de Mauroy, identified by the author (and confirmed by Daguenet 2014) as Louis Antoine Anatole Célestin Musnier de Mauroy (1815–1876); it was inhabited by his widow, the baronne de Mauroy (Anaïs Le Harivel de Maizet Mauroy) at the time of Herbet’s writing.⁹³

It was for the studio of this house that Decamps asked Corot to paint The Four Times of Day. The first published reference to the panels appears to be by Dumesnil in 1875: ‘Four tall panels, representing The Four Times of Day, decorated the studio of his friend, Decamps, in Fontainebleau’.⁹⁴ The inventory confirms that the panels were in or near the studio at Decamps’s death and are listed as follows: ‘In the studio, three landscape studies, and in a little room leading to the attic, a Turkish School by Decamps, summer by the same, four landscapes on wood panels by Corot and various sketches’,⁹⁵ the whole valued at 4,000 francs. This entry is in the second part of the inventory, which is divided into two sections, the first for the furniture and the second for the paintings and other works of art. The studio is listed in both sections, described in the first as a cabinet de travail and in the second as an atelier. While the inventory does not indicate its location in the latter section, in the first section the cabinet de travail is the first room listed on the first floor, described as ‘Decamps’ workroom, lit by two windows overlooking the courtyard and the garden’,⁹⁶ connected to a small cabinet de toilette which contained, among other things, two boxes of colours and a quantity of ébauches. The studio appears to have been very full, containing three easels and a quantity of brushes and other utensils d’atelier, and also, among other things, two commodes, a table, two armchairs (fauteuils d’atelier) and figurines, a recorder, arms, sculptures and books. Beyond the cabinet de toilette a further small room is listed, described as a petit cabinet ‘serving as an attic’ containing, among other things, three gilded frames.

An article of 17 April 1864 in the local newspaper, L’Abeille de Fontainebleau, one of a number reporting on the forthcoming sale of Decamps’s two houses (although presumably the house in the rue Saint‐Merry was not sold at this time), describes a small, presumably windowless room near the stairs, in which there is a trapdoor for accessing the attic (‘Auprès de l’escalier est un cabinet noir dans lequel s’ouvre une trappe par laquelle on monte au grenier’).⁹⁷ It seems likely that the petit cabinet and the cabinet noir are the same. While the first is described in the inventory as a room being used as an attic (grenier), it is not improbable that it also contained the trapdoor used for access to the real attic. This must also be the room where the Corot panels were being stored, as it seems unlikely that they could have passed through an opening like a trapdoor into the further room.

Decamps’s house still stands at 108 rue de France.⁹⁸ On the first floor of the main house there are six main rooms, of which three run along a corridor. What complicates issues is that the internal layout on the first floor must have been changed at some point, perhaps during the late nineteenth‐century restoration. In the present layout the corridor runs along the garden side so that three of the bedrooms now overlook the courtyard, but it appears that originally the corridor was set on the courtyard side. In both the article of 17 April 1864 and in the inventory the bedrooms are described as overlooking the garden. Furthermore, the two small rooms cited above, the cabinet de toilette connected to the cabinet de travail and the cabinet noir or petit cabinet servant de grenier, no longer exist. Nevertheless, the first room, to the right of the stairs, which has a window looking on to the garden, and another over the courtyard, can be identified as Decamps’s studio. An article entitled ‘Vente des deux maisons Decamps’ and dated 10 April 1864 in L’Abeille de Fontainebleau also describes this first room as lit by windows over the garden and courtyard, and communicating with a cabinet de toilette; the article of 17 April calls it the first of the rooms on the first floor, and it is the first room on this floor to be listed in the inventory.

There are three further bedrooms that look over the courtyard, a room with two windows at each end, looking on to both the garden and the courtyard, and lastly, a small room, now used as a bathroom, with one window looking over the garden. This last can be identified as Decamps’s bedroom; it is described in the inventory, in both the furniture and paintings sections, as ‘lit by one window overlooking the garden’ (‘éclairée sur le jardin par une croisée’). Furthermore, the article of 17 April 1864 makes it clear that his bedroom was the last on this floor, situated at the end of the corridor. The inventory lists a cabinet de toilette next to Decamps’s bedroom, which could be identical with an even smaller room leading on from the present bathroom.

In the second part of the inventory the paintings, drawings and engravings listed in rooms on the ground and [page 129]first floors of the house are predominantly by other artists, with a few of Decamps’s works recorded in the ground‐floor dining room and in the atelier and the salon on the first floor. Prior to the inventory being taken, the majority of Decamps’s own works had been removed to Paris for the sale in April 1861 (the inventory lists by title 36 paintings, ‘ébauchés et inachevés’ that had been removed and were being housed in an apartment at 43 rue de Provence in Paris, belonging to the dealer Francis Petit). Before their removal to Paris these had been inventoried by the critic Philippe Burty, who had travelled to Fontainebleau accompanied by Petit in the autumn of 1860 (presumably Burty’s list exists also as a separate document), and he describes what he calls Decamps’s chambre de travail in an article published in the Gazette des Beaux‐Arts in May 1861: ‘The honourable and intelligent expert, M. Francis Petit, had taken him to Fontainebleau to inventory the panels and canvases [by Decamps] which an unexpected death had left on the easel, in the corners of the studio or turned against the wall.’⁹⁹ He lists among other things the palette still barely dry, ‘on a shelf, a death’s head, cut into two, a statuette of a camel in plaster: in a frame, several lithographs by Eugène Le Roux, by Roqueplan, and The Young Girl at the Fountain by Papety, these were the objects which struck the vistors’.¹⁰⁰ He further mentions a wallpaper, ‘an awful floral wallpaper, with large bouquets of roses on a grey ground’, and describes the room as poorly lit by a window looking onto the garden.¹⁰¹ In the preface to the 1861 sale catalogue Petit also writes of the studio being full of paintings in various states of completion: ‘At the moment when death came to strike the great painter, his studio, which he had left that very morning, was filled with canvases in various states.’¹⁰² He also mentions works by Decamps laid out in the salon, including an important drawing, Moses saved from the Waters.

In their descriptions of Decamps’s studio both Burty and Petit are plainly referring to the cabinet de travail of the inventory, where the majority of the artist’s own works must have been stacked up before their removal. However, the lithographs and engravings by Roqueplan and Le Roux, and Papety’s The Young Girl at the Fountain mentioned by Burty, are a mystery, as the inventory lists no such works in this room. Eight engravings and lithographs are recorded in the petit salon on the first floor, together with a small drawing by Victor Hugo (1802–1885), drawings, perhaps by Decamps, of Montargis, Le Verrier and Fontainebleau, and five landscapes by Decamps (these are not mentioned by Petit, nor were they removed for the sale, and were either missed or deliberately left). In the chambre à coucher there is simply listed one engraving, La Disputa by Giovanni Volpato (1735–1803). Perhaps some of the works had been moved into other rooms, for example the salon, however the Papety does not appear at all.

Such questions are not helped by vagaries in the inventory itself; on the whole it lists fewer works than were included in the 1865 sale (for which see below), with paintings and engravings listed as groups (these are itemised fully in the sale catalogue). The lack of any reference to the panels by Corot, however, is easier to explain: after Decamps’s death they had obviously been stored in the small room so as to be out of the way when Burty came to do his own list; with them were a few stray works by Decamps himself that were not included in the 1861 sale.¹⁰³ However, it does appear, that Burty confused Decamps’s studio with his bedroom: while the chambre de travail is undoubtedly the same as Decamps’s cabinet de travail of the inventory, the room he describes with its window onto the garden (apart from the works of art) is more likely to be Decamps’s bedroom.

It appears that Decamps’s cabinet de travail was always intended to be a temporary studio. The 1864 article in L’Abeille de Fontainebleau also identifies as a studio a room on the first floor of the left of two separate outbuildings set towards the road (essentially a stable block where, as a keen rider, Decamps probably kept horses): that on the left composed on the ground floor of a stable for two horses near to which is the dung‐pit, with a hayrack and wooden manger, of a saddlery with a canopy over the door, of a room for two carriages, of a vestibule containing the stairs; on the first floor a large landing lit by a window and a French window and vast studio looking over the courtyard and with a window over the road, a chimney for a studio stove.¹⁰⁴ Before Decamps acquired the property, such a room would probably have been used as accommodation for servants, as indeed were those in the right‐hand building: this contained three bedrooms on the ground floor, two on the first, and two attic bedrooms on the second. An earlier article of 27 March, also in L’Abeille de Fontainebleau, refers more explicitly to this ‘vast studio’: ‘This hotel, currently occupied by M. le colonel des Guides, was a recent acquisition of Decamps’, who was having installed for himself there a vast studio, not yet finished at the time of his death’.¹⁰⁵ Its unfinished state explains why a chimney but no stove had been installed, and why the painting equipment and easels were still in the first‐floor room in the house. Two outbuildings can still be seen today on the left and right sides of the courtyard in front of the house. The layout of the left‐hand lodge concurs with the article of 10 April, having a large first‐floor room with two large windows overlooking the courtyard and a further small room at the end with a window overlooking the street. The chimney for the stove would presumably have stood between the windows, where there is now a fireplace. There is a door at either end, one opening onto the landing at the top of the stairs, the other into the small room. It is evident that this large room is where Decamps was establishing what he intended to be his main studio. With its floor‐length windows this a larger, lighter space than that in the house, which, according to the inventory and the descriptions of Burty and Petit, was crammed full of furniture, objects and Decamps’s own paintings. It is reasonable to conclude that Decamps asked Corot to paint the panels for this yet unfinished studio rather than for the smaller, cluttered room in the house.

It was concluded above that the landscapes were painted not on artist panels but on board designed and constructed for interior panelling schemes. Corot was no stranger to painting on such supports and in many of his decorative schemes he did paint directly onto the walls. His scenes in the château de Gruyères were painted directly onto the eighteenth‐century wall panelling prepared by Daniel Bovy with an ivory‐coloured paint, on to which Bovy had drawn the ovals that were to contain the landscapes.¹⁰⁶ The scenes in François Parfait Robert’s bathroom were painted directly onto the plaster walls, without any preparation.¹⁰⁷ Robaut also notes that Corot painted the scenes for Léon Fleury directly onto the wall. They are now on lined canvas, however, and it is difficult to determine whether they were originally on canvas or have been transferred.¹⁰⁸

In the case of the scheme for Decamps, while there is no doubt that Corot painted onto panelling, questions about the origins of the panels and their relation to Decamps’s studios need to be addressed. It is extremely unlikely that they were part of an original interior panelling scheme: the Hôtel Britannique was almost certainly not originally panelled. At the period in which it was built, the late 1820s, the fashion for installing schemes of panelling was already in decline and being replaced by fabrics and, above all, by wallpapers. However, even from the end of the eighteenth century and increasingly during the nineteenth, panelling was being moved, updated and installed elsewhere. Indeed, at Decamps’s house panelling was installed during the twentieth century in two of the ground‐floor rooms: unpainted wood in the dining room and simple grey and white panelling in the sitting room, similar in style to the Corot panels.¹⁰⁹ While some room schemes were reinstalled in their entirety, by the second half of the nineteenth century a growing interest in individual panels meant that it was now rare to find complete sets of panelling.¹¹⁰ Perhaps, therefore, the house at Fontainebleau received a set of recycled panelling as part of a campaign of decoration at some point before the 1850s, or by Decamps himself. The nature of the panelling, of poor quality, hastily assembled and roughly finished, the distemper of a cheap variety, suggests that it started life in a rather modest dwelling.

Even if Decamps’s first studio had received recycled panelling, however, it is extremely unlikely that the Corot panels were painted directly on to this. Contemporary descriptions give clues as to their original state: in the inventory they are described as ‘panneaux de bois’ (‘wood panels’), and in Decamps’s subsequent sale as ‘Quatre paysages formant panneaux de décoration’ (‘Four landscapes forming decorative panels’). In his manuscript notes Robaut variously calls them ‘décoratif à Fontainebleau’ (‘decoration in Fontainebleau’), ‘panneau peint par Corot’ (‘panel painted by Corot’) and ‘partie d’une suite de quatre panneaux’ (‘part of a series of four panels’), and in his published catalogue as ‘quatre panneaux peints chez Decamps à Fontainebleau’ (‘four panels painted in Decamps’ house in Fontainebleau’). By contrast, Robaut describes the Gruyères panels, which are painted directly on to the wall, as ‘quatre panneaux décoratifs peints sur la boiserie [panelling] du château de Gruyères’ (‘four decorative panels painted onto the panelling of the château de Gruyères’).

While it is not known when Robaut saw The Four Times of Day, or indeed if he ever saw them in situ, the differences in description could well be an indication of the difference in the decorations, one an integral part of a boiserie scheme, the other on separate wooden panels hung on the wall. But perhaps the most pertinent evidence is that provided by the location of the panels in the inventory itself. The fact that it states that they were being stored in a small room implies that if they had been on display, the panels had subsequently been unhung, suggesting that, while it is possible that they could have been removed from panelling, it is more likely that they were loose pieces from the start. As it seems very probable that Decamps had intended his studio in the main house to be a temporary home for the panels, with their ultimate destination being the new studio, it would have made no sense for Corot to paint directly on to the walls even if panelling was present. The most likely scenario is that the panels were loose pieces of boiserie acquired by Decamps, perhaps from old panelling fitted into the house at an unknown date and passed to Corot for painting. The source of the panels will probably never be known.

Thus it appears that the panels were intended to be hung on the wall in the manner of easel paintings. One final question remains: whether, in view of the fact that they were probably intended for the new studio (and in storage at the time of the inventory), they were ever hung, either on a temporary basis in the old studio or in the new, if otherwise empty, room in the stables. It does seem likely that they were hung. Dumesnil describes Corot’s panels as ‘decorating Decamps’ studio’, while Robaut asserted that Decamps spent hours contemplating them. So while they could have been propped up in a row, it is more probable that Decamps hung them on the wall. The composition of the panels, the grouping of the trees, and placement of the signatures were obviously carefully planned around the sequence in which they would have been hung – that is, in a continuous row rather than in pairs. There would have been space in the original room for them to have been arranged in a row on either of the two windowless walls. In the new atelier Decamps evidently intended to hang them, or indeed did hang them, in pride of place along the long wall opposite the windows, the only wall long enough (at about 6.6 m) to accommodate them in a row of four.¹¹¹

Decamps’s Reaction to Corot’s Panels

Corot famously completed The Four Times of Day in a week, as reported by Dumesnil from a conversation with the artist on 22 January 1865: The free and easy handling, perhaps even more than was usual, caused by the rapidity with which [page [131]] [page 132] they were painted:– in one week; it came quickly and well. Decamps, dazed by this extraordinary agility, said from time to time to his friend: ‘Not so fast, don’t hurry yourself so, there is enough soup here for a few more days!’, But, replied Corot, from whom I have these details, ‘it went by itself: I could not hold myself back; which made me think that if I had been asked for decorative painting, I could have done it – and even with pleasure, but except for one occasion, and it was moreover a painting for a church, nobody ever asked me for that kind of work’.¹¹² Corot was presumably thinking of his first commission, the oil on canvas Baptism of Christ for the Eglise de Saint‐Nicolas du Chardonnet, Paris, in 1845.¹¹³ But in actual fact, in addition to commissions from private individuals, by this date he had also been asked to supply paintings for the churches at both Ville‐d’Avray and Rosny. A similar anecdote is related concerning Corot’s panels for François Parfait Robert’s bathroom in Mantes: Informing the painters who were getting ready to whitewash: ‘Stop there, I am taking care of those walls. To Italy!’ It was a matter of eight days. With the first tools that came to hand and on a coarsely prepared wall, he improvised a magical apparition of the country dear to his heart.¹¹⁴ This is taken to be an exaggeration: that Corot could not have painted the panels in so quick a time, and without careful planning.¹¹⁵ Unlike NG 6651–4, they depict recognisable views of sites in Italy, which cannot be said to have been dashed off.

Decamps’s reaction to the panels was quoted by Robaut in 1882: After having given all his life a very large place to the procedures of execution, when he saw the broad, simple and wholesome effects which Corot obtained from the first brushstroke with the relationships between tones alone and the clarity of his colouring, Decamps, it appears, may have wanted to change his whole method and return to naivety; he spent hours on end contemplating these works of his friend, which, like so many others, he had appreciated too late.¹¹⁶ In his manuscript notes Robaut recorded a slightly different version of the anecdote: he said to Corot: ‘What a misfortune to see that at my age. Ah! If I were to start my career again how I would give up all my cooking and my sauces? Why has it all been ruined for me? That is what has lost me my career, because it has prevented me from looking sufficiently. What I have been lacking is your supreme possession: sincerity. ’ ¹¹⁷ Decamps visited Millet in the 1850s, and, as Sensier relates, received a similar reaction to a request to see his work: ‘Your pictures please me very much, you go to work with freshness and without fatigue. Will you show me what you are doing?’ Millet showed him all he considered worthy of Decamps, who became silent, looking at him as an unhappy man looks at a happy one. ‘Ah, that is good – painted as I should like to paint. You don’t know what hard work it is to get rid of a bad education. I like to see painting young, vigorous, and healthy.’¹¹⁸ In fact Decamps had received very little formal artistic education, a source of regret in his later years, expressed in his letter to Louis‐Désiré Véron: ‘I tried out a few small paintings at home. They were bought, and from then on my education as a painter was neglected.’¹¹⁹

Decamps’s remarks on Corot’s panels are in some ways reminiscent of Silvestre’s criticism published in an article [page 133] in 1856, and perhaps read by Decamps himself, of how he sought inspiration for mountains and forests in sugar bowls and the grasses growing in fish tanks instead of studying nature itself: ‘This is how Decamps distorted everything true and sincere within himself and only stimulated the most artificial part of his imagination.’¹²⁰

Dating of the Four Times of Day

Moreau‐Nélaton, in his essay in Robaut’s 1905 catalogue, asserts that Corot painted the panels in 1858, and in Robaut’s manuscript notes he gives a date of 1858 for each one apart from Evening; Robaut’s catalogue dates the panels to about 1858.¹²¹ As Decamps bought the house in July 1858, it is plausible that Corot painted the panels in that year, probably in the summer.¹²² The accident that befell Decamps’s youngest child must have taken place in the late summer or early autumn, as evidenced by two letters from Corot to Philippe Comairas, one dated 16 October 1858 and a second postmarked 24 November 1858, both of which state that he had learned of the accident from Bézard (artist Jean‐Louis Bézard [1799–1881]). A further letter, undated but written in 1858 from Comairas to Huet, states that Decamps is ‘still at Veyrier [where] his son drank vitriol … he watches him die of hunger and thirst, his torture has lasted three months’.¹²³ However, pending further information coming to light, the date will have to remain uncertain. As it is not known when Decamps decided to prepare the room above the stables for his main studio (as it was unfinished at the time of his death, it is possible that he did not embark on it straight away), or at what point he asked Corot to paint the panels for it, it is possible that Corot painted the panels in 1859 or even early 1860.

The Decorative Scheme for the Dining Room in Decamps’s House in the rue de France

1858 was the year, however, in which Decamps embarked on a further decorative scheme, on the theme of eating, for the dining room. This included (at least) four paintings by himself, one by François Bonvin (1817–1887) and two by Philippe Rousseau (1816–1887).¹²⁴ The scheme owes a debt to Chardin: both Bonvin and Rousseau were associated with the revival of interest in Chardin’s still lifes, emulating particularly, as here, his compositions of such objects as fruit, vegetables, eggs and kitchen vessels. Rousseau himself owned two paintings by Chardin, Bonvin was known for his expertise on the artist, and it is probable that Decamps himself had owned a painting by Chardin, The White Tablecloth, painted to screen a fireplace.¹²⁵ The decorations for the dining room were described (with dimensions) for Decamps’s 1865 posthumous sale as ‘Panneaux formant decoration de Salle à manger’: Still Life with Herring, Bread and Cheese (fig. 22); Still Life with Pipe and Matches (fig. 23); Fish, Lobster, a Bottle and a Glass, Boiled Eggs, a Silver Oil and Vinegar Bottle; A Pot of Herbal Tea, a Cup, a Potion and Various Other Objects; Bonvin’s, Plate of Oysters, Lemon and Half‐Full Glass on a Table with Tablecloth; and Rousseau’s Apples, Pear and Pewter Pot on a Bare Table and Eggs and a Salad on a Plate, a Bottle, a Loaf of Bread and a Knife.¹²⁶ Five of the paintings, as also described in the 1865 sales catalogue, are inscribed with captions in Latin on the theme of eating and drinking.¹²⁷ The inventory lists these paintings and two additional ones, attributing those by Decamps to a Mme Daumier (with subsequent revision by Decamps himself), and gives the positions for the paintings within the dining room. Five paintings in gilded frames were hung next to the chimney: ‘one representing a pipe and a pot of matches, another herrings, cheese and bread, the third asparagus and cauliflowers. All three by Mme Daumier and revised by Decamps, and two paintings by Bonvin, oysters and fruit’.¹²⁸ These are presumably the two paintings by Decamps now in Cleveland (figs 22, 23), the Bonvin painting of oysters (37 × 45 cm) and the Rousseau apples, pears and pewter pot (37 × 45 cm). The painting of asparagus and cauliflowers is unknown. To the right and left of the door hung two paintings, ‘one representing a salad, bread and an egg by Philippe Rousseau and the other lobsters and pike by Mme Daumier and revised by M. Decamps’,¹²⁹ while above the door was ‘a basket of grapes and various fruit by Mme Daumier’.¹³⁰ These must refer to the Rousseau salad [page 134](80 × 65 cm) and the Decamps still life with fish and lobster (80 × 65 cm); the painting of grapes, however, is unknown. Above the dresser hung ‘a picture representing a pewter pot and a candlestick by Mme Daumier’, perhaps the painting by Decamps of ‘Un pot de tisane’ (68 × 60 cm).¹³¹ All these paintings, unlike those by Corot, were painted on canvas.

The Panels and Frederic, Lord Leighton

The Corot panels were bought by Alfred Cadart at Decamps’s posthumous sale of 1865; in August that year he sold them to Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–1896). In the 1850s Leighton had spent a period living and working in Paris,¹³² and by September 1855 he was installed in a studio in the rue Pigalle. His friend and fellow artist Giovanni Costa (1826–1903) recalled how, during his stay, Leighton ‘fell under the influence of the romantic French school of colourists, such as Robert Fleury; later again of the French naturalists, above all [Gabriel] Decamps and [Ernest] Hébert’.¹³³ Leighton met Decamps in 1855 and Corot around 1861–2, when he gave Leighton advice on using the pigment Laque de Gaude (weld lake).¹³⁴ By October 1858 Leighton had left Paris permanently for Rome.

It has been said that Decamps was one of those artists of particular importance to Leighton: ‘Leighton sought out these artists in their studio‐houses, observing their life‐styles; he also acquired works by or associated with them.’¹³⁵ It is known that in 1856 Leighton visited Barbizon on several occasions. We may also speculate that he might have visited Decamps in 1858 in Fontainebleau before departing for Rome, and that if the panels had been painted that year, he would have seen them in situ.

In 1864 Leighton commissioned the architect George Aitchison (1825–1910) to design a house at 2 (now 12) Holland Park Road, which became known as Leighton House.¹³⁶ The main part of the house was completed in 1866. The Corot panels were hung in the drawing room with other landscape paintings by French and British artists, including John Constable’s (1776–1837) Study of Trees (private collection), George Hemming Mason’s (1818–1872) Wind on the Wold (Tate), paintings by Daubigny and a further landscape by Corot, Evening on the Lake (NG 2627). While this room was planned around a ceiling roundel by Delacroix, study for La Paix vient consoler les hommes (Salon de la Paix, Hôtel de Ville), which Leighton had purchased at the artist’s studio sale in February 1864, it is assumed that the Corot panels were also part of his scheme from an early stage: ‘The room was clearly designed from the start to incorporate the Delacroix, and the Corots were probably also part of its original conception … Leighton acquired the Corots only shortly before construction started, which perhaps required the modification of Aitchison’s plans.’¹³⁷ The colour scheme in particular seems to have been devised around their coloration, with blue floor, brown walls and curtains of greens, browns and cream.

As noted above (see Support), both Morning and Evening have the remains of putty around the inner edges of the borders, on top of the distemper and priming layers (fig. 24). While it is possible that these could date from before their acquisition by Decamps, there are two problems associated with such an interpretation: first, as interior panels the shallow border is designed to be visible, so the presence of the putty on top of the border is hard to explain. Second, it lies above the priming layers, which are assumed to have been added at the time of Corot’s painting, probably by Corot himself. Its presence is of interest in the light of the report in the Building News of 1866, which states, ‘in the walls are four paintings by Corot, in panels wrought in cement, and intended to be fixtures’.¹³⁸ It is likely that ‘cement’ here describes a sort of plaster or stucco. Two sixteenth‐century Venetian paintings owned by Leighton were also displayed in plaster frames cemented into the wall, and a nineteenth‐century copy of Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, was built into the staircase hall, again with a plaster frame.¹³⁹ The Building News article is the only known description of the drawing room from the 1860s, and the only one to mention such frames for the Corot panels. Many describe the brown walls, called by one author (Moncure Daniel Conway) ‘cigar‐tinted cloth, with modified fleur‐de‐lis spots’ in 1882.¹⁴⁰ Certainly by 1895 the panels were hung, in conventional frames, on either side of a recessed window, as shown in a photograph of that year of the drawing room, said to have been taken by Adolphe Augustus Boucher (fig. 25). Interestingly, Leighton ignored the proper sequence, and paired Evening and Noon on the left and Night and Morning and the right.¹⁴¹

It is difficult to know how to interpret the reference in Building News. While it is likely that the panels, for reasons outlined above, were not hung in frames in Decamps’s studio, thus necessitating the addition of frames after their purchase, if they had been put into plaster frames on their arrival at Leighton House, then when they were later put into conventional frames the walls would have to have been redecorated, yet the brown wall covering seems to have been present from the start. The theory of stucco frames will have to remain a hypothesis pending further research, particularly in view of the fact that only two of the panels bear the putty remains.

Leighton was among the first British collectors to buy Corot’s work. An early biographer describes how he bought paintings by Corot when they were little valued, [page 135] ‘knowing full well that their beauty was unapproached by any of the landscape artists who were then working’, and that others would come to appreciate their worth.¹⁴² It is perhaps the case that Leighton particularly valued and desired their lack of narrative and their evocations of the beauty of nature for a room that is an early example of an aesthetic interior. Corot’s late work had little influence on Leighton’s own style: his landscape studies are more indebted to Corot’s early Italian work, which was known in Paris in the 1850s.¹⁴³ But the French artist was perhaps in the mind of Adelaide Sartoris in her novel A Week in a French Country House, in which the painter Kiowski (based on Leighton) talks of Corot, referring unmistakably to his late work: ‘When I first got there [to the river] it was all cool greys and silver tones – a perfect Corot – with just that little bit of dead tree coming in there you see … to give it a red accent.’¹⁴⁴ Such works typifying Corot’s late style became the bedrock of other, later private collections in Britain, while his early work was largely ignored.¹⁴⁵

Leighton died on 25 January 1896; in July that year the contents of his studio, including the Corot panels, were sold. They aroused much interest and comment, of which the most compelling is the report by the art critic for the Pall Mall Gazette, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847–1900; cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson): Not the least interesting part of the sale consists of pictures by other artists which belonged to Lord Leighton. Whether purchases or gifts, they seem very often to show the painters in a characteristic mood when working for themselves, without fear of the man who cannot see large errors or form or value, but is most exacting about the trivial finish of details. Such are the four noble upright panels which Corot painted for Deschamps [sic] … The Corots deserve a place in the National Gallery, and if any millionaire should care for Corot, Lord Leighton, England or art, he could not do better than present them to the nation.¹⁴⁶ While such a wish has been fulfilled more than a hundred years later, it appears that, with regards to the panels painted by Corot for Léon Fleury, a comparable sentiment was similarly unheeded at the time. In 1897 these were on exhibition at the Dutch Gallery. Reports in the press unfailingly compared them to the Leighton panels, with one in particular remarking: ‘How well they would look in one of our public galleries!’¹⁴⁷

Provenance

Painted for artist Alexandre‐Gabriel Decamps (1803–1860); his sale, Escribe, Paris, 23–24 January 1865, lots 31–4, bought by Alfred Cadart (1828–1875) for 850 francs (Le Matin), 630 francs (Le Midi), 520 francs (Le Soir) and 510 francs (La Nuit);¹⁴⁸ bought from Cadart by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–1896): Leighton’s accounts show a payment of £180 to Cadart in August of that year;¹⁴⁹ Leighton House Sale, Christie’s, 14 July 1896, lots 294–7, bought by Agnew for 6,000 guineas,¹⁵⁰ from whom bought by Robert James [page [136]] Loyd‐Lindsay, 1st Baron (Lord) Wantage (1832–1901); passed from Lord Wantage to his widow, Hon. Harriet Sarah Jones‐Loyd, Lady Wantage (1837–1920); bequeathed to Arthur Thomas Loyd (1882–1944); inherited by his son Christopher L. Loyd (1923–2013); bought from the Estate of Christopher Loyd with the assistance of the Art Fund (with a contribution from The Wolfson Foundation), 2014.

Exhibitions

Exhibited by Cadart et Luquet with other landscapes by Corot (among which most noteworthy were ‘quatre grands panneaux décoratifs provenant de la maison de campagne de Decamps…’) from April 1865 at a premises on the boulevard Montmartre, Paris ;¹⁵¹ Paris 1925 (55–8); Oxford 1934 (13–16); Birmingham 1945–52 (9); London 1949–50 (154, 151, 158, 161); London 2009 (19–22 in accompanying book); London 2014 (not numbered); London 2016 (36). On loan from the Loyd Collection from 1997 to 2014 .

Literature

Dumesnil 1875, p. 67; Robaut 1882, pp. 48–9; Lang 1884, p. 30; Temple 1905, nos 47–50; Robaut 1905, I, p. 188; II, nos 1104 (‘Le Bord de l’eau’, actually Evening), 1105 (‘La Grosse Tour’, actually Morning), 1106 (‘Le Chevrier’, actually Night) and 1107 (‘Le Paysan rattachant sa jambière’, actually Noon); Parris and Russell 1990, p. 5, nos 11–14; B. Bryant, ‘An Artist Collects: Leighton as a Collector of Paintings and Drawings’, in Gere 2010, pp. 22–9, esp. p. 22; M. Hohn, ‘Stimmungsraüme, Corots Wanddekorationen’, in Schäfer 2012, pp. 293–6, esp. pp. 294–5; Callen 2015, pp. 178–9; Herring 2017.

Notes