JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT | Italian landscape in the Roman campagna, with haystacks at left and a farm on the hill to the right

Private collection, France;
With Galerie Sanct Lucas, Vienna;
There acquired by the present collector. 

M. Dieterle and C. Lebeau, Corot: Sixième Supplément, Paris 2018, p. 21, cat. no. 18, reproduced. 

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This work is well preserved and feels very fresh. The canvas has an old lining. The paint layer is stable. There is no abrasion. No retouches are visible under ultraviolet light except for a few tiny dots in the upper right. The varnish is quite glossy, but the restoration is good. The work can be hung as is.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is one of the most important landscape painters in 19th century France.  His style absorbed that of the 17th century masters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin while anticipating the Impressionist landscapes of the later 19th century.  Corot's small-scale canvases, such as the present example, would have been painted en plein air, a technique that was rarer at the time but later embraced with enthusiasm by the Impressionists.  Though at the time he used these oil sketches as preparatory works, his remarkable sense of light and soft, loose brushwork give them an air of modernity which makes them as appealing to today's viewer as his more finished compositions. 

Though the artist was primarily based in Paris, the warm light in the present painting places the landscape in the Roman campagna. Corot traveled in Italy several times: in 1825, 1834 and 1843. Dieterle and Lebeau date the painting to 1827-28, at the end of his first trip to the country (see Literature).