Enfants au Bord d'un Ruisseay dans la Campagne à Lormes [Children at the edge of stream in the countryside near Lormes]

(Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot)

Children at the Edge of a Stream in the Countryside near Lormes dates from the early 1840s, one of the most productive and inventive periods in Corot’s art. Confident in his command of landscape composition, he moved easily between forthrightly simple views of a familiar French countryside and large, complex landscape inventions that merged real details with idealized vistas to create seamless new worlds. For much of the decade, Corot turned his attention to developing suitable figural subjects that would complement his landscapes in mood and ambition. In Children at the Edge of a Stream… the fit between the quiet, rich Morvan farmland and the three very individual youngsters who play in the foreground is an especially successful one. Placed low around a stream or pond, with pasturelands rising softly behind them, the children are enfolded in their landscape. The simplicity of their costumes, the quietness of their gestures, all suggests a life in harmony with the placid scene around them. The youngest child, a little boy at the left, has crept down close to the water’s edge, so intent upon something in the stream, a frog perhaps, or an insect that has caught his eye, that he is completely oblivious to the artist (and to us the viewer). The younger of the two girls, standing back a cautious step behind her sister’s shoulder, gazes straight out of the painting in open curiosity while reaching forward with a tiny flower, as if to welcome us into her landscape. Finally, the shy older girl who blossoms in a simple pink skirt — the strongest color note in the painting — gazes demurely to the side, unable to meet our glance. Together the children are a quiet, unstrained metaphor for childhood itself, safe in their familiar homeland, only slowly becoming aware of a world beyond them.

The landscape in Children at the Edge of a Stream… brings together several of Corot’s favored elements — the silver-trunked birch trees that catch a glint of sunlight on the left, the wildflowers that sparkle across the foreground, and the soft banks of clouds that fill the sky, casting a cool, even light over the entire composition. By 1840, these were virtually signature details for Corot who incorporated them in many of his compositions from various regions of France. Children at the Edge of a Stream…, however, can be very securely identified with the village of Lormes in the Morvan region of Burgundy, where Corot worked during several consecutive summers in the early 1840s, by the romanesque church atop the gentle rise in the distance.

Corot painted the church on at least two other occasions: an unusual wide-format view of the village of Lormes, its surrounding terrains, and its hilltop church is preserved in an oil sketch now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a very finished painting of the church itself belongs to the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. Corot’s father was originally from Burgundy and Corot’s niece lived in Lormes. Family connections had first attracted him to the region, but its particular beauty and soft light brought him back repeatedly during his life. Alexandra Murphy

Painted ca 1840-43.
Provenance: Sale, Paris, Hotel Drouot, 13 Nov, 1870; M. Gerard, Paris; M. Frémard, Paris, 1909; Galerie Durand-Matthiesen, Geneva; B. J. Van Wisselinh & Co., Amsterdam; Miss Olive Hosmer, Montreal; The Lefevre Gallery, London; Private Collection, Japan to 1998.

Literature: A- Robaut, L’Oeuvre de Corot, 1905, vol. II, no. 392, illus ; G. Bernheim de Villers, Corot Peintre de Figures, 1930, no. 57, illus.

Exhibited: The Lefevre Gallery, London, XIX and XX Century French Paintings and Drawings, 1964, no. 10 ; The Arts Council of Great Britain, Edinburgh Festival, Corot, 1965, no. 39.Matthiesen Gallery & Stair Sainty Matthiesen. Spring Catalogue 2001