Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 'The Marsh at Arleux', 1871

This sketch was painted at Arleux-du-Nord, in north-east France, just to the east of the town of Arras and south of Douai. Corot’s friend, fellow artist and biographer Alfred Robaut, who lived in Douai, had persuaded him to leave Paris in April 1871 to escape the Commune, a revolutionary government which had taken power in March following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. Corot spent the spring and summer working in the area, which is notable for the marshes lying along the Scarpe and Sensée rivers. He was particularly inspired by the marshes along the Sensée at Arleux, and once back home at Ville-d’Avray in August he wrote to the wife of his friend and fellow artist Constant Dutilleux, remembering ‘those pretty marshes at Arleux-Palluel’.

It is probable that this sketch was painted rapidly in the open air, and it may be unfinished. The grey atmosphere of a rainy day is lightened at the right, where the clouds are breaking up to reveal blue sky. They conceal the sun, whose rays tinge their edges with white, while also lighting up the stretch of water immediately in front of the trees. The paint is thin, and the weave of the canvas shows throughout. Corot added thicker paint in areas such as the trees at the left and in the grey clouds brought over the tops of the trees at the right. In the foreground he used the handle end of his brush to scratch out forms in the paint, a practice seen in such other paintings as The Four Times of Day: Noon, where he scratched out grasses around the foremost tree trunk. Here they include groups of horizontal lines, circular forms, vertical lines and a semicircular form. While they are extremely cursory they are possibly meant to represent a boat, nets, fishing poles and a trap. Corot depicted fishing nets on the river bank of Landscape at Arleux-du-Nord.