NARRATOR—This late landscape depicts one of Corot’s favorite sites--the large pond near Ville d'Avray, a placid village on the outskirts of Paris where the painter had a house.

As in many of Corot’s other depictions of this site, a stand of trees screens the foreground. Through it, we can see the silvery surface of the pond in the middle distance and the group of houses on the opposite shore.The female figure in the foreground seems little more than a pretext for introducing a note of dissonant color into the grey-green tonalities which dominate the picture.

This small work elicited favorable remarks at the Salon of 1870, even though many critics considered Corot's landscapes passé by that time. What struck critics most was how personal and poetic Corot's work had become. One critic wrote "He is no seeker after reality, he is a dreamer, who, through all the changing and varied aspects of nature, pursues always the same poetic,
uniform note. They still say that when he paints Ville d'Avrayhe knows how to be realistic when he feels like it. Well, no; what he sees everywhere is not what is in nature, it is what is in himself. If you sent him to Egypt to paint beside the pyramids, he would find there his silvery tones and mysterious thickets."