Young Woman in the Woods

Camille Corot is famed as a landscape painter. In the last twenty years of his life, however, he also produced many portraits and paintings of the human figure. After reaching the age of 60, he began composing with figural subjects from his imagination. Imaginary women, wearing folk costumes from many lands, appeared on his canvases. This gently smiling young woman, although depicted as in the woods, was actually painted in Corot's studio, using a professional model whom he had had don the costume of an Italian peasant woman. Corot made three trips to Italy. In this work, Corot takes up again and develops an image from the earlier study Young Italian Woman Standing he had created during his first stay there. In Young Woman in the Woods we see his recollections of the Italy of his youth and the poetic world, not shackled by the actual, that he explored in the final years of his life.