Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s oeuvre is largely defined by landscapes that are often lyrical and atmospheric. Corot admired seventeenth-century classical landscapes, such as those by Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), with their careful placement of natural forms, such as trees and rocks, in a timeless, beautiful, and harmonious presentation. He was informed by their tenets but did not strictly adhere to them, instead adding his own personal approach to nature with a poeticism of color and light to a sheet of paper or canvas.
 
For centuries, Italy was a popular destination for French landscape artists, who drew inspiration from tours of Roman monuments and ruins as well as from jaunts in the countryside, where they practiced drawing and painting from nature. Corot followed suit, and on his first trip he spent three years in Italy (1825–28). There, he joined an early school of open-air landscape painting, devoting his attention to the surrounding Roman countryside with its temperamental weather and changing light effects. He produced hundreds of drawings, often in graphite, pen and ink, chalk, and charcoal. Corot experimented with small, portable, quickly executed paintings, what his biographer Alfred Robaut referred to as études peintes, often on paper, which were later affixed to canvas (marouflé). They were essentially private studies, directly observed records of nature, seldom used as direct preparation for larger compositions, and often viewed only in the artist’s studio. This was the case for works such as The Roman Campagna with the Claudian Aqueduct.¹
 
This working method of painting oil sketches from nature freely out-of-doors was an established method that Corot had learned before going to Italy from his older artistic mentors Achille Etna Michallon (1796–1822) and Jean Victor Bertin (1767–1842), who in turn had been trained by the examples of Pierre Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819).² De Valenciennes recorded his thoughts on the subject in his influential treatise Elémens de perspective pratique (1800). He explained that this exercise of making oil sketches in the open air was intended to train in eye-hand coordination to capture fleeting effects that the artist could then utilize when painting more finished landscapes in the studio.³
 
Corot’s first Italian journey informed his future artistic endeavors and gave him the confidence to paint in a less constrained, freer style while still recording major structures and outlines, based on his firm belief in the value of drawing. Corot’s biographers, Alfred Robaut and Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, write little about his work during his subsequent period in France between 1828 and 1834. However, it is known that Corot took an extensive sketching tour around France, spending considerable time in the surrounding areas north of Paris and up to Normandy. He had ties to that region, having attended boarding school in Rouen from 1807 to 1811. While in Normandy on consecutive visits, he painted around Rouen, such as along the coast at Trouville, Honfleur, Saint-Adresse, Le Havre, and villages such as Saint-Lô and Troisgots.⁴ Corot’s treatment of the landscape was also shaped by the realism of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish landscapists and their broad panoramic views, as well as by the expressiveness of contemporary British painters such as John Constable, who exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824 and 1827–28.
 
The Courtyard of a Peasant’s House, Normandy must have been made on one such trip to Normandy, probably in the 1850s.⁵ In this oil-on-paper sketch, Corot has expressed the greens of the trees and fluctuating bands of color—the golden hues of the field and the green pastures. On the left, a pair of tall, thin trees cast long shadows. The leaves become hazy along the edges, typical of Corot’s treatment. Buildings are clustered in the middle ground before the land rises in a gap through the trees to the background with a cityscape at top. The artist was looking toward the northeast to the distant hilltop village and the castle ruins of Domfront.⁶ Alfred Robaut mentions that the artist wrote about a plan to visit Domfront in May 1857.⁷ A few paintings and sketches by Corot of that location have dates from the mid-1840s and 1850s, such as Le pressoir de Domfront (fig. 51.1).⁸
 
The painting depicts a serene, clear summer day, devoid of much activity. The soft focus and free handling of the paint record the artist’s impressions of the natural scene. Often Corot’s informal, small paintings have a sense of timelessness, and he dots the landscape with figures in local costume, as seen here with the white-coiffed peasant woman in the Normandy countryside. Corot commented that he “very much likes figures animating his landscapes . . . to see animals and people rambling around the countryside, where he could not live absolutely alone.”⁹ In 1896 André Michel looked back at Corot’s studies and was struck by how different they were from the works he displayed in the Salon, which he called “constrained and forced” in comparison to his studies, which were “spontaneous, original and charming.”¹⁰
 
Technical examination with infrared reflectography reveals how Corot worked out the composition before painting it over an abbreviated underdrawing.¹¹ Sketchy lines indicate the placement of trees and shrubbery in the middle ground and the city in the distance. At lower right, two ellipses, perhaps suggesting a pathway, were eliminated in the final composition. The figure was added later in paint. Corot used a similar process for other paintings, such as The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct, in which a similar sketchy underdrawing demarcates the elements of the composition. —Dena M. Woodall