Le concert champêtre

Pastoral Concert (French: Le Concert champêtre ) is a painting by the French painter Jean -Baptiste Camille Corot, which was built between the years 1844 and 1857. Today, the painting in the Musée Condé is to visit the northern French town of Chantilly.

It shows in the foreground three girls sitting in a meadow. The first of these plays a cello, the second kneeling in the grass and reading a book, and the third, which is light blue dressed and has stretched out on the grass, supporting her head on her hand and looks at the first two girls. In the background, three other girls are shown, the pick on the shore of a lake fruit from the trees.

Corot began work on the painting in the year 1843. The inspiration for this design he had received on a trip to Switzerland, where he watched a group of young shepherd girl at the break next to a bush. He enriched the subject to leaves of forests, as he had observed on a lake in Italy, and with trees from the forest of Fontainebleau. In 1844 Corot exhibited the work. In 1857 he decided to revise it. He replaced the meadow in the background by a pond in darker colors, and the young shepherd who was leaning against a tree, by a swan floating on the water of the pond. He set the horizons a bit deeper, so that the landscape altogether darkened slightly and won in poetry. In 1857 Corot placed the painting in the Salon and told to have it revised and corrected. However, in 1872 he led changes in the foliage.

The structure of the image in the foliage almost everywhere bounded the view like the curtains of a theater, reminiscent of the structure of the images of the masters of the 17th century. The water surface in the background wearing the look in the distance, where combines the blue water surface with the blue of the sky. The two groups of people form two triangular shapes. Corot used a light brush stroke, which can be somewhat blurry the painting as the first photographs that emerged at the time of the artist and of which he possessed a large amount. The artist used a limited color palette, where the blue hues of the sky and the lake harmonize with the browns and greens of the plants. What is striking is the unsymmetrical between the right part of the image is dark, and the left part, which is enlivened by the light and the früchtepflückenden women.

The image is assigned to the Barbizon School, whose members are in opposition to the classical, represented by the conservative Academy of Fine Arts conventions saw. They received their inspiration from the English landscape painting, particularly of the works of John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonington, and the Dutch landscape painters of the 17th century.