View near Epernon

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

National Gallery of Art

A person at the center of this loosely painted horizontal landscape rides a dark horse across a field as a man to the left works the field behind a horse-drawn plow. The field is carpeted with muted and gold-shaded green, and a grove of trees in the right third of the composition are painted in fern, olive, and dark green. A patch of darker green near us and to left of center is dotted with red and yellow to suggest flowers. The men and horses are small in relation to the composition. The people have brown skin and are painted with a few strokes in dark gray and muted green for the man behind the plow to the left and pale yellow and white and a red cap for the person on horseback. A band of houses with tan or light yellow walls and gray or terracotta red roofs line the far side of the field to the left, and an arched bridge crosses what appears to be a shallow, grassy ravine near the center. The horizon comes about a third of the way up this composition and a few smoke-gray clouds line the upper edge of the otherwise milk-white sky. The artist signed the lower left corner, “COROT.”