View of Lake Garda (Souvenir du lac de Garde), ca. 1865-1870. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Oil on canvas. Gift of Clarke Bunting in memory of his wife, Catherine Conover Bunting.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was one of the leading French landscape painters of the 1800s. During repeated trips to Italy between the 1820s and 1840s, he dedicated himself to painting and sketching from nature. Later in life, when he preferred to work in his Parisian studio, Corot relied on these sketches for inspiration or painted landscapes from memory. In this painting, a boatman and a contadina (Italian peasant woman) lounge on the banks of Lake Garda, a site that Corot had visited three decades earlier.
