The Painting: At the age of seventy-six, Corot continued to paint from nature during his travels throughout France. He also produced invented studio landscapes such as this picture, in which human figures animate a clearing beside a lake. The setting is the outskirts of a village whose houses reflect the waning sunlight and provide the picture’s only rectilinear forms. A gray-bearded man wearing a hat points to the right. He, together with a boy and a woman depicted from behind, may be weighing the prospect of spending the evening in place or moving on. In the shade of a great tree that stretches over the gesturing man and his companions are two women seated on the ground, one of whom holds a baby.
The painting is signed and dated 1872, yet its first owner, the industrialist François Stumpf (1829–1905), consigned it with others from his collection, including multiple works by Corot, to an auction held in Paris on February 28, 1873. In the sale catalogue the painting was entitled
Les Bohémiens. The often-cited French dictionary by Emile Littré published in 1873 defines
Bohême and
Bohémien as follows: “(1) name for vagabond bands, without fixed domicile, without regular occupation, and often dabbling in fortune-telling: they are also given the name of Egyptians and Zingaris; (2) by extension, a vagabond of unruly morals; and (3) bohemianism, that group of people who lead a bohemian life.”[1] Although the terms are homonyms of bohemia and bohemian, their meanings, as they stem from Littré’s initial definition, do not correspond closely to usage in English, in which the widely preferred designation is Roma.[2]
Yet it is Romani people whom Corot evokes in this canvas, albeit poetically rather than descriptively; this was fully in keeping with his approach to landscape painting, which is the long-established genre to which
Les Bohémiens belongs. The artist’s poeticism is embedded in the material process he employed to produce the painting. Standing before the blank canvas that had been primed with a white ground, he applied thinned brown paint with a broad brush to lay in the major forms of the composition that he would subsequently build up using other colors and finer brushes. An equally important purpose of the initial sketch (
ébauche) was to impart a warm tonality to trees, terrain, and figures. However, rather than cover the sketch entirely with layers of other colors, such as green for foliage, it was part of Corot’s aesthetic to leave it visible right up to the end.
For example, in the foreground are broad horizontal strokes of brown paint that belong to the initial sketch. Rather than paint over those strokes entirely, Corot left them in reserve so that they may be read as describing undulations of the topography. The short, light strokes of green and grayish white for grasses, as well as slight touches of other tones, seem to float above the brown undercoat, contributing variety and a sense of depth to the surface. Corot did something similar with the large tree, where brown underpaint is visible beneath subsequently applied colors that shape branches and foliage, with the successive stages of paint application working together to convey volume and density. In the painting’s final state—what the viewer sees today—the marked contrast between the earthiness of the solid forms that were initially sketched in brown underpaint and the brightness in the blue and pink sky, which has no brown paint underneath, is an effect that Corot looked to achieve. This technique was not unique to Corot, but he was prodigious in the way he employed it to poetic effect; it appealed not only to generations of collectors but also to generations of artists who encountered the man and his work from the 1820s onward. Artists who admired these features of Corot’s work included the Impressionists, whose first independent exhibition was held in 1874, two years after Corot painted
Les Bohémiens.
The figures in
Les Bohémiens are rendered summarily but with an assuredness that, like the landscape elements, rewards close looking, in details such as the hats—all the figures wear them—and especially the garments of the standing woman: her costume was a favorite studio prop of Corot’s, consisting of a skirt and bodice with shoulder straps worn over a white blouse with detachable sleeves. Her yellow sleeve is also seen, with variations, in
The Woman with a Pansy of 1855–58 (Denver Art Museum, 1934.13) and
Italian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve (L’Italienne) painted about 1870 (see fig. 1 above). The outfit is seen with a blue sleeve in
A Woman Reading, painted in 1869–70 (The Met,
28.90), and a dun sleeve in
Sibylle, executed about 1870 (The Met,
29.100.565).[3] Corot combined items of clothing from Italy and southeastern Europe in multiple ways to achieve a particular effect in these and other works. In
Les Bohémiens, the woman’s costume was intended to evoke, if not accurately, the supposed origins of Romani people in Bohemia (part of present-day Czech Republic). Although Corot is rightly regarded as a landscape painter first and foremost, his eye for details of dress was instinctual: his father was a wigmaker and his mother a milliner. His interest in the clothing of the inhabitants of the places he sketched dates at least to his first trip to Italy, in 1825–27, when he drew and painted studies of individuals.
In
Les Bohémiens Corot also recalled the itinerant lives of Roma people by means of the rustic tubelike shelter in the foreground at the left, for which the painter probably resorted to a popular illustration or print for a model, one that aspired to greater ethnographic accuracy, paradigmatic examples of which are the etchings of Théodore Valério, who traveled in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1850s (fig. 2). To the right of the shelter in Corot’s painting, a single note of red indicates a flame burning under a small cauldron suspended from a tripod.
Corot’s cataloguer, his friend Alfred Robaut (1830–1909), listed ten paintings by the artist that he described as depictions of
Bohémiennes (or
Zingaras), each showing a single woman whose clothing and accessories serve as attributes of a conjured identity. All are dated to the 1850s or later.[4] As the eleventh and latest dated work in this subject category, The Met’s
Figures in a Landscape (Les Bohémiens) stands out as a multifigure composition, one that features males and females, in which the theme, landscape, atmosphere, and technique are unified by a pervasive sense of the transitory. While this may be the only painting by Corot in which he fully integrated a multifigured Roma subject with his late landscape style (frequently represented by paintings that he deemed Souvenirs), its reflective tenor was not entirely the function of an aesthetic rooted in timelessness. Despite its idyllic appearance, the painting touches on themes approached in myriad ways by Corot’s contemporaries in a period marked by the pan-European revolutions of 1848 and their aftermaths, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the Paris Commune of 1871, and consequent displacements of populations. Examples range from Honoré Daumier’s numerous iterations of
The Fugitives to Edouard Manet’s
The Old Musician (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1963.10.162), painted in 1862 and exhibited at Galerie Martinet, Paris, in 1863.[5]
François Stumpf and Corot: In 1858, François Stumpf married Elisabeth Monot (1839–by 1894), daughter of his employer, Eugène Séraphin Monot (1814–1884). An anonymous testimonial letter supporting his appointment as
chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1887, written on Monot & Stumpf letterhead, states that he “collaborated for thirty years with his father-in-law Monsieur E. Monot in directing the crystal factory at Pantin, having spent twelve years at a crystal factory in Lyons. The worksop at Pantin recently furnished all the polished crystal for Paris’s City Hall. . .”[6] Founded by the elder Monot in 1851, the firm operated under various names until the family sold it in 1918.[7] From the 1860s onward, Stumpf amassed a collection of modern paintings bespeaking progressive, if not entirely cutting edge taste by, among others, Eugène Boudin, Antoine Chintreuil, Gustave Courbet, Charles Daubigny, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña, Jules Dupré, Henri Fantin-Latour, Armand Guillaumin, Henri-Joseph Harpignies, Jean-Jacques Henner, Eugène Isabey, Charles Jacque, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Stanislas Lépine, Adolphe Monticelli, Camille Pissarro, Jean-François Raffaëlli, Théodule Ribot, Alfred Sisley, Antoine Vollon, and Félix Ziem.[8]
Corot and Stumpf became friends in the late 1860s, and the strength of their bond can be assessed by an episode during the Franco-Prussian War, when, during the siege of Paris, Corot painted
Danse Rustique (or
Fin de Journée) as a gift of consolation for Madame Stumpf (location unknown).[9] The artist stayed at the Stumpf home on the Normandy coast at Etretat from September 8–21, 1872, where he painted a number of works. In the same year he painted
Madame Stumpf and her Daughter (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1970.17.23), not as a commission but as a gift to the sitters. At one point or other, François Stumpf owned at least fifteen paintings by Corot.[10] He acquired all of these in the last decade or less of the artist’s life, and those that can be identified date to this period, including landscapes painted while Corot was his house guest. Given Stumpf’s personal relationship with Corot, the unknown circumstances in which Stumpf consigned
Les Bohémiens for sale in February 1873, probably within less than a year of its acquisition and almost certainly from the artist himself, are intriguing. In any event, the painting did not sell: it remained Stumpf’s property and the friendship endured. On January 6, 1875, Corot wrote to Stumpf: “Long live joy! . . . At this time I have stopped working. I await the forces [of nature]! All [my best] to you. — C. COROT. — Give a strong embrace to Elisa and her young lady. I await the forces.”[11] The artist died on February 22. Stumpf lent
Les Bohémiens and other works to the posthumous Corot retrospective in 1875. When Stumpf parted with the painting has not yet come to light.
Asher Miller 2025
[1] For the unabridged French entry, see E[mile]. Littré,
Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, Paris, vol. 1 (1873), pp. 362–63. Egyptian and Zingari are two among many terms with complicated etymologies that were used in past centuries to describe the Roma people. Conjecture that the Roma originated in Egypt led to long-accepted usage of the term Gypsy, but this is now widely acknowledged to be suffused with pejorative associations based on cultural stereotypes that were used to justify mistreatment.
[2] The scope of European imagery devoted to the multiple, overlapping subjects represented by the term were the subject of a major exhibition,
Bohèmes: de Léonard de Vinci à Picasso, held at the Grand Palais, Paris, and the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, in 2012–13, with accompanying catalogue edited by Sylvain Amic (Paris, 2012).
[3] For a comprehensive study of the painting reproduced here as fig. 1, see Sarah Herring,
National Gallery Catalogues: The Nineteenth Century, French Paintings, Volume 1, The Barbizon School, London, 2019, pp. 154–65.
[4] Robaut 1905, nos. 1033, 1387, 1422 (The Met,
29.100.563), 1423–25, 1555, 1556, 1996, and 2351.
[5] See Edouard Papet and Henri Loyrette, “The Fugitives,” in
Daumier, 1808–1879 (exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada), Ottawa, 1999, pp. 288–301.
[6] For François Stumpf, see: Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France, LH//2555/19, consulted via Base de données Léonore, N° de Notice: L2555019 (https://www.leonore.archives-nationales.culture.gouv.fr/ui/notice/350771). See also: Genea.org (https://gw.geneanet.org/maisongrise?n=stumpf&oc=&p=francois&type=fiche). — For Elisabeth Monot, see: Genea.org (https://gw.geneanet.org/maisongrise?lang=en&pz=pia+a22331&nz=decroix&p=elisabeth&n=monot). — For Eugène Séraphin Monot, see: Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France, LH//1911/50, consulted via Base de données Léonore, N° de Notice: L1911050 (https://www.leonore.archives-nationales.culture.gouv.fr/ui/notice/268008).
See also: Genea.org (https://gw.geneanet.org/maisongrise?lang=en&pz=pia+a22331&nz=decroix&p=eugene+seraphin&n=monot). All online resources consulted on August 8, 2025.
[7] For the firm’s history, see: https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/ressources/artists-personalities-catalog/cristallerie-de-pantin-92992 (online resource consulted on August 8, 2025), and Giuseppe Cappa,
Le Génie Verrier de l’Europe: Témoignages de l’Historicisme à la Modernité (1840–1998), 2nd ed., Brussels, 1998, p. 358.
[8] A substantial if not complete picture of the collection can be gauged from auctions of works from Stumpf’s holdings: February 28, 1873 (Lugt 33721); April 9, 1874 (Lugt 34742); March 27, 1876 (Lugt 36324); November 27, 1894 (Lugt 52970, including works from Elisabeth Stumpf’s estate); May 7, 1906 (François Stumpf estate sale).
[9] Corot’s gift is recounted in multiple publications, also used here as sources for other information about the artist’s links to the Stumpf family: see Etienne Moreau-Nélaton in Robaut 1905, vol. 1, p. 270, and Henry Lapauze, “Un Collectionneur, Ami de Corot et de Dupré (d’Après des Documents inédits),”
La Nouvelle Revue 39 (April 1, 1906), pp. 289–98, republished as “La Collection Stumpf,” in the catalogue of Stumpf estate sale, cited above (pp. 5–17).
[10] These are Robaut 1905, nos. 2056, 2057, 2074, 2076, 2125, 2138, 2200, 2216, 2386, and 2430. Additionally, Robaut identified the following paintings in Stumpf’s collection, to which he did not devote dedicated entries in his catalogue, although he identified them separately, by their entry numbers: 205–207 and 208 (described under 1804). For
Danse Rustique, or
Fin de Journée, see André Schœller and Jean Diéterle,
Premier Supplément à "L'Œuvre de Corot" par A. Robaut et Moreau-Nélaton, Paris, 1948, no. 95.
[11] The “young lady” to whom Corot referred in his letter of farewell was Marie Eléonore Stumpf, known as Madeleine (later Mme Paul Auguste Marie Barbier Saint-Hilaire, 1868–1949), the little girl shown with her mother in the double portrait in the National Gallery, Washington. For Madeleine, see Genea.org (https://gw.geneanet.org/maisongrise?lang=en&pz=pia+a22331&nz=decroix&p=marie+madeleine+eleonore&n=stumpf), consulted on August 10, 2025.
