Jean‐Baptiste‐Camille Corot 1796–1875
NG 2625 
The Leaning Tree Trunk

Sarah Herring, 2019

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

1860–5

Oil on canvas, 49.7 × 60.7 cm¹

Signed bottom right in brown paint: COROT

Support

The original canvas is of a fine plain weave, with a thread count of 23.5 × 23 threads per cm². It has been relined but the stretcher is probably original. The original tacking edges are present at the sides and bottom, but mostly missing at the top. The thin priming does not extend on to the partially preserved tacking edges and was thus likely applied by the artist, and cusping is visible in the X‐radiograph. The number ‘2176’ (not identified) is written in blue crayon on the stretcher.

Materials and Technique²

This painting is among those in the National Gallery collection representating a change in style in Corot’s work from the 1850s onwards. Colour became less important and he increasingly favoured muted tones. He often painted quite thinly, leaving parts of the initial sketch or even the ground visible, and would work the picture surface with innumerable small touches of paint to create a shimmering effect. This can be seen here in the branches to the left of the main clump of trees, where the foliage is painted in touches of grey. Corot’s usual practice throughout his life was to paint the sky last, over which he added extra branches and foliage to trees already painted. This is the case here, the additional branches stretching out to the far left of the picture. He also supressed branches in favour of a sparser scene, for which see the infrared photograph (fig. 1).

The ground is composed of lead white tinted with a small amount of yellow earth, over which a blackish‐brown translucent underpaint has been applied in all areas apart from the sky. This underpaint can readily be seen where it has been left exposed, as well as through the thinner upper paint layers.3 Corot has used lead white tinted with cobalt blue and French ultramarine in the sky, and in the greyish mauve of the middle distant landscape a third, more unusual blue pigment, cerulean blue, has been used.4 This cobalt stannate pigment has a greenish tinge and was identified by its hue and the presence of tin in conjunction with cobalt. Cerulean blue is thought to have been supplied first as a watercolour pigment by Rowney, an English colour‐maker, and has been found in several French paintings from the 1870s.5 The presence of cerulean blue in this painting therefore demonstrates an early use of this pigment.

The mid‐green foreground was created with a complex mixture of pigments: lead white, Naples yellow (associated with zinc), red earths, bone or ivory black, French ultramarine, cobalt blue and some cerulean blue.6 Prussian blue [page 143] [page 144] is also present in the green background passages. Much has been written, by Robaut and later scholars, on how Corot preferred to mix his greens rather than use ready‐made ones, but in fact he used both, as is evidenced also by other paintings in the National Gallery collection.7 The very bright orange streaks in the boat and on the woman’s cap in NG 2625 have been identified as cadmium orange or yellow, a pigment range that came into use most notably from the mid‐1840s.8 Such bright opaque pigments were used by both Corot and other Barbizon artists to create final accents against the green of the landscapes.9

Analysis of paint samples from several areas (including white highlights from the tree and sky and the green of the landscape) indicated that the binding media was heat‐bodied walnut oil.10

Conservation and Condition

NG 2625 was cleaned and restored by the National Gallery in 1980. The painting is in generally good condition, apart from some wearing in the dark areas and a small vertical damage in the sky above the left horizon.

Discussion

The right side of The Leaning Tree Trunk is dominated by a dense mass of foliage and the gnarled trunk of a tree, of which some branches twist to the left. Two single trunks stand in the foreground; that on the right bends gracefully, while the trunk on the left reaches right out across the picture. In the background is a lake. There are three figures: a boatman in his boat, a woman gathering twigs from the tree and another woman sitting under it. The scene is one of the lakes at Ville‐d’Avray, l’Etang Neuf, created between 1688 and 1690 by the duc d’Orléans to provide water for the water features in his park at Saint‐Cloud. Corot painted a series of works based on this feature.11

The Leaning Tree Trunk is particularly closely related to a painting in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, The Bent Tree (L’Arbre penché) (fig. 2), which, like NG 2625, was formerly in the collection of the accountant Alexander Young.12 The Melbourne picture includes a cow at the right and buildings on the far side of the lake, and the paintings differ in a number of further small details. The basic composition shared by these two works is to be found in a number of other paintings by Corot, including [page 145] Ville‐d’Avray: Lake with the Leaning Tree Trunk (fig. 3);13 Lake with the Leaning Tree Trunk;14 Lake with the Leaning Tree Trunk;15 and Lake with the Leaning Tree Trunk: Souvenir of Castel Gandolfo (Paris, Louvre).16 A drawing also in the Louvre, Leaning Trees on the Shores of the Lake (fig. 4), is almost certainly a study for the Melbourne picture, to which it is more closely related than it is to NG 2625.17 A picture in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, also shares the motif of branches reaching out across the picture surface.18 A number of the paintings, including the Melbourne picture, have Ville‐d’Avray in the title. The Reims picture is an accurate view of the lake at Ville‐d’Avray from the south‐west, painted on the spot with the foreground of leafy trees added later in the studio, and it has generally been given first place in the series, with the view gradually transformed in subsequent versions, often with elements such as the boat and boatman added.19 Corot took the motif of the trees directly from a drawing he had made in 1826 during his first visit to Italy, Clump of Trees at Civita Castellana (fig. 5).20 The Reims painting follows the disposition of the trees in the drawing almost exactly, from the kink in the trunk arching across, with its slender side shoots, to the upright silver birch trunk on the right, copied from the straight vertical trunk on the extreme right of the drawing. Both these trees are integral to the [page 146] mass of intertwined trunks and foliage that dominates the right of both the (Italian) drawing and the painting. By the time Corot painted NG 2625 and the Melbourne picture the two single tree trunks have broken away from the rest of the trees to stand in front as two separate decorative elements in the composition. Both have become more stylised and the trunk leaning across has lost its side shoots. The lake setting has also become more generic in The Leaning Tree Trunk, as in other paintings of the series, with the buildings suppressed.

These paintings are also closely related in both mood and motif to a further series, of which the most famous is Souvenir of Mortefontaine (fig. 6), exhibited by the artist at the Salon of 1864 .21 Robaut dates the related paintings generally to the late 1860s and early 1870s.22 Mortefontaine is a village north‐east of Paris, known for its park and artificial lakes that were created towards the end of the eighteenth century for Louis Le Peletier (1730–1799) who inherited the chateau and its grounds; in 1798 the estate was bought by Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844), who made further additions. The grounds were refurbished in 1862, when the duc de Gramont built a new chateau in the ‘grand parc’. In the 1850s Corot painted some views of the area, although it has been suggested that Souvenir of Mortefontaine itself and its related works can be seen as reminiscences of his views of the Italian lakes.23

There are distinct differences in composition between the group of paintings to which NG 2625 belongs and that centred around Souvenir of Mortefontaine. In the foreground of the latter the trunk and branches of the right‐hand tree reach over to the left of the picture, while on the left a single tree stands alone. Its trunk stands straight, but its upper half echoes the movement of the mass of branches on the right. A woman and children gather around the tree, the woman reaching up to gather twigs or foliage.

The leaning branches of Souvenir of Mortefontaine can also be traced back to a drawing made by Corot during his first visit to Italy in 1826, Civita Castellana. Stream sheltered by [page 147]Trees (Paris, Musée du Louvre), as has been noted by Bazin;24 Claude and Japanese prints have also been suggested as possible sources for this motif.25 Toussaint specifically places Souvenir of Mortefontaine in a short period when Corot became influenced by Japanese art: he took from Japan the idea of the screen in the foreground, in this case the trees, flattening the picture surface, through which one glimpses the distance.26 This device is also present in the series to which The Leaning Tree Trunk belongs.

Dating

Bazin describes the group to which NG 2625 belongs as coming after Souvenir of Mortefontaine: ‘We also see the theme [of Souvenir of Mortefontaine] combined with a tall upright dead tree, born on the banks of the lake at Ville‐d’Avray (R1497 and 1498) and which, once discovered, served Corot again and again.’27 The dead tree refers to the prominent single upright trunk found on the right of these compositions, but in fact, as we have seen, this trunk is an exact copy of the upright tree on the right of the drawing mentioned above, Clump of Trees at Civita Castellana.28 Other authors offer dates that suggest that The Leaning Tree Trunk was the first in the series. Marie‐José Salmon lists this and the Melbourne painting as the first of Corot’s variations (1855–70) on the theme of Mortefontaine.29 Robaut dates The Leaning Tree Trunk and the Melbourne painting to 1855–65, prior to or concurrent with Souvenir of Mortefontaine. Most recently, Nathalie Michel and Vincent Pomarède date the Reims picture to 1860–5, thus concurrent with Souvenir de Mortefontaine. Although the Reims picture can indisputably be given first place in the series, it is perfectly feasible that Corot painted the variants, including NG 2625, in the first half, or possibly second half of the 1860s.

Copy

A copy signed ‘TH.R.’ was sold at Christie’s, South Kensington, 26 August 2004, lot 153.30

Provenance

In the collection of M. Nicolas; sold by him to Arthur Fouques Duparc (1842–1915) in 1867 for 1,500 francs;31 owned by the dealers Arnold (Arnoldus Petrus Eversteijn [born 1840]) and Richard Howard Tripp [or Trip, 1849–1919]), 8 rue Saint Georges, Paris, in 1898;32 sold by the same to the Knoedler Gallery on 8 May 1899 for 68,000 francs; sold by Knoedler to Alexander Young (1828–1907) in September 1899 for £3,760;33 acquired from Young by Agnew, London, in 1906, and sold to George Salting (1835–1909) in the same year;34 Salting Bequest 1910.

Exhibitions

Paris 1875 (202); Lille 1881 (1385); Portsmouth, Nottingham, Stoke‐on‐Trent, Barnard Castle and London 1980 (5); Bristol, Newcastle and London 2003 (not numbered); Tokyo and Kobe 2008 (68); London 2009 (27 in accompanying book); London 2014 (not numbered). On loan to the National Gallery from Salting 1907–10; on long‐term loan to the Government Art Collection, 10 Downing Street, London, from 24 February 1947 to 21 July 1948 and from 22 May 1957 to 4 January 1980.

Literature

Rousseau 1884, illustrated p. 27; Alexandre, Keppel and Holme 1902–3, no. C34; Robaut 1905, II, p. 362, no. 1121; Halton 1906, I, p. 9; anon. 1908, pp. 339–40; Scharf 1968, p. 65; Davies and Gould 1970, pp. 27–8; Bazin 1942, pp. 53– 4, 2nd edn 1951, p. 48, 3rd edn 1973, pp. 48–50; Mills and White 1981, pp. 66–7; Preston 1983, p. 502; Beauvais 1987, pp. 80–2; Hoff 1995, p. 70; White, Pilc and Kirby 1998, pp. 81 and 91; Roy 1999, p. 332; Herring 2001, p. 84; Michel 2005, p. 220, French trans., p. 378, Italian edn, pp. 185 and 194; Pomarède 2009, p. 177; Stonor, Herring and Tomlinson 2012; D. Schäfer, ‘“Man darf in keiner Sache unentscheiden bleiben”: Corots Zeichnungen in Italien von 1825 bis 1828’, in Schäfer 2012, pp. 81–5, esp. p. 85; and A. Eiling, ‘“Immer das Gleiche: ein Meisterwerk”. Corots späte Landschaften’, in ibid. , pp. 409–15, esp. p. 410.

Notes