When Corot exhibited Ville-d'Avray at the Salon of 1870, he was the most revered living French landscape painter. One Salon critic wrote of the painting: "I salute that smooth master, that virgilian poet—no, even better, that peasant's soul, Corot. Before the enchantment of his work one forgets what one has seen in art and what one knows about criticism. It is no longer a canvas, and he no longer a painter. … I open a window and I am at home in a poet's nature."

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