JEAN-BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT (1796 Paris 1875) Jeune femme jouant de la mandoline dans l'atelier. Oil on wood. Signed lower left: COROT. 43.7 × 34.5 cm. Provenance: - Henri Rouart Collection. - Auction Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Paris, 9-11 December 1912, lot 174. - Collection Leonard Gow, London. - Christie's auction, London, 28 May 1937, lot 39. - Gallery Reid & Lefevre, London, acquired at the above auction. - Charles Goldman Collection. - Auction Sotheby's, New York, 21.3.1962, lot 57. - Swiss private collection for several generations, acquired at the above auction. Exhibitions: - Paris 1996, Galerie Schmit, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot dans les collections privées, 24.4.-9.7.1996, no. 42 (with illustration in the catalogue). - Geneva 2010-2011, Musée Rath, Corot en Suisse, 24.9.2010-9.1.2011, no. 92 (with illustration in the catalogue). Literature: - Claude Bernheim de Villers: Corot, peintre de figures, Paris 1930, no. 323. - Alfred Robaut: L'œuvre de Corot, Paris 1965, vol. III, p. 298, no. 2148 bis (there erroneously as oil on canvas, with illustration on p. 299). Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's "Jeune femme jouant de la mandoline" shows us a young woman sitting in front of an easel in a studio and playing a mandolin. This graceful depiction of a figure with an extremely poetic and sensual character is a particular rarity in Corot's oeuvre. The graceful figure of the sitter and the intimacy conveyed by the scene are reminiscent of those depictions of female figures found in Renaissance painting and in particular in the paintings of the Dutch masters of the 17th century. The inspiration, which is reflected in the habitus of the woman depicted, is likely to have come to Corot during his extensive travels to Italy, which he undertook several times between 1825 and 1843. Although the painting being auctioned here was painted around 1870, long after Corot's travels in Italy, the stylistic proximity of the young woman depicted to Corot's paintings of Italian peasant girls cannot be denied. Our painting shows just such an idealised beauty, whose sublimity is aptly accentuated by her posture as well as by the artistic attributes of the mandolin and the easel with canvas. However, this work stands in the context of six other paintings that Corot painted between 1865 and 1870, which similarly depict a young woman in an Italian dress in front of an easel. These six other paintings are all in important collections and museums: the Musée d'Orsay (inv. no. RF 3745), the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (inv. no. 1942.9.11), the Spencer and Marlene Hays Collection, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon (inv. no. B 627), the Baltimore Museum of Art (inv. no. 1950.200) and the Louvre, Paris (inv. no. RF 1974). The auction of the painting offered here, "Jeune femme jouant de la mandoline" by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, thus offers a unique opportunity to acquire an exceptionally rare painting of museum quality in the artist's oeuvre.