Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Souvenir de Mortefontaine, 1864, Oil on canvas.
Louvre Museum, Paris.

"The park of Mortefontaine, north of Paris, was laid out “à l'anglaise” in the eighteenth century and offered inspiration to Corot for a great many related landscape paintings. One of these, Souvenir de Mortefontaine, which he sent to the Salon in 1864, was purchased by Napoleon III and is now in the Louvre."

"Comparison of the various paintings evoking the park of Mortefontaine and the sketches Corot made for them reveal much about how the artist created his landscapes. To Corot, landscape motifs were compositional building blocks in a carefully constructed design which he arranged almost abstractly, working to harmonize line and shape, tonalities and silhouettes, distance and foreground, solid mass and reflections. [The paintings of the Mortefontaine series] demonstrate the carefully designed substructure underlying these intensely poetic, often romantic, images of nature. Corot’s work, while rooted in the classicism of Claude and Poussin, led directly to Monet and developments in late nineteenth-century landscape painting."

-The Frick Collection, New York.