While best know for his landscapes, French painter Camille Corot nonetheless left in his wake a considerable number of rarely exhibited yet highly sought figure paintings. And while Corot initially used these oil studies to improve the quality of his free composition for later historical and narrative landscapes, it was not long before his figure paintings became autonomous works, prized for their direct portrayal of emotional and spiritual states.

 

Standing out in Corot’s creative output is the remarkable oil painting A Girl Reading. This volume puts this impressive painting into context with a variety of Corot’s paintings and drawings that both shed light on the role of reading that is characteristic of his work and provide the first representative overview of the artist’s works inspired by the genre as a whole. Included are essays on Corot as a figure painter and thirty full-color, extensively annotated examples of his work.