Camille Corot

.

Willibald Sauerländer reviews the exhibition

L’Armoire secrète: Eine Leserin im Kontext (The Secret Cabinet: A Reader in Context),  an 

exhibition at the Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland, February 4–May 15, 2011.

                                              

in New York Review of Books, April 28 2011 issue, in an article titled Quiet 

Genius - here's an excerpt:

"The high point of the show is La Femme à la perle from the Louvre. The title is eloquently 

misleading, for what gleams on the sitter’s chaste brow is not a pearl but only a leaf. Again we 

have a picture of a Parisienne—we even know the model’s name—dressed as an Italian peasant, 

but above all, it is a daring metamorphosis of the most famous portrait of the Italian Renaissance, 

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. We know Leonardo’s portrait as a work shrouded in legend, inviting 

travesty, mystified by exegetes. Corot’s portrait is the purest echo of that masterpiece.

His circumspect approach does not subvert Leonardo’s greatness. Here too, he remained the lark 

next to the eagle. He has adopted everything from his predecessor—the shadows playing about the 

eyes, mouth, and cheeks, the hands laid one upon the other—but the appearance of La Femme à la 

perle seems suffused with the naturalness of Corot’s landscapes. She is a Mona Lisa who has read 

Rousseau."

Here are the two portraits discussed side by side:

     

     

Left: Jean-Baptiste-Camille COROT: La Femme à la perle, circa 1858–1868, 

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Right: Leonardo di ser Pietro DA VINCI, known as Leonardo da Vinci: Portrait of 

Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, between 1503 and 1506, Musée 

du Louvre, Paris