Pond at Ville-d'Avray (late 1860s): Art, History and Details

Pond at Ville-d'Avray (late 1860s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Corot painted this view of a pond near his home at Ville-d'Avray, just west of Paris, in his late style distinguished by soft, hazy forms and gentle, silvery light. Such paintings merge his lifelong study of nature with nostalgic memories and contrast sharply with the more formal compositions and precisely rendered shapes of his early landscapes. Corot's devotion to the direct study of nature was a major influence on the Impressionists.

Object facts

• Title: Pond at Ville-d'Avray
• Date: late 1860s
• Creator attribution: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 87 x 127 x 11 cm (34 1/4 x 50 x 4 5/16 in.); Unframed: 58.1 x 99.4 cm (22 7/8 x 39 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1944.80

A detail from the museum

The dreamlike quality of the painting reflects Corot’s desire to reproduce the “first Impression” of the landscape.

Collection credit

Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Robaut, Alfred and Etienne Moreau-Nélaton. L'Œuvre de Corot. Paris, France: H. Floury, 1905.
• Catalogue of the Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection : Bequest of Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, 1944. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1944.
• Francis, Henry S. "Paintings in the Prentiss Bequest." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art XXXI, no.6 (June,1944):87-89.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.