Ville-d'Avray

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

National Gallery of Art

From a grassy embankment, we look across a placid body of water to a cluster of cream-white buildings on the far bank in this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is painted with blended strokes, giving it a soft and hazy look. Closest to us, dots of canary yellow, sky blue, and white suggest flowers growing on the verdant embankment. Closer to the water, two trees have ash-brown trunks and canopies like clouds of pale sage green. To our left of the trees, a light-skinned woman stands near the water with a bundle on her back. She wears a straw-yellow cap, a shin-length dress, and an apron. A second person wearing a yellow cap and a blue shirt sits facing away from us, to our right of the trees. Buildings and trees along the far bank are reflected in the pale blue water. The villa there is made up of several interconnected buildings with rectangular windows and shallow, gabled, charcoal-gray roofs. One more building is nestled into the trees that surround the complex, to our right. Painted with a few strokes of ocean blue, gray, or pale yellow, at least three people stand or walk along the far bank. The forest stretches across the horizon, which comes a third of the way up the canvas. A few small, puffy white clouds drift across the expanse of blue sky above. The artist signed the painting with black letters in the lower left corner, “Corot.”