Description
This painting, acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1949, as a work by Corot, proved to be a copy when the signed original reappeared at a public auction in New York in 1981. Although the original, Jeune Femme Pensive or La Méditation, is not in the Corot catalogue raisonné compiled by his friend Alfred Robaut, that painting does have an unquestionable origin. According to one source, Corot painted the original version in Paris in 1866–68 and allowed his pupil, Eugène Lavieille, to make a copy with permission.
Provenance
Probably Gottfried Tanner, Bahnhofstrasse 39, Zürich. Galerie Matthiesen, Berlin. (According to notes in the file on "Matthiesen Gallery, London" in the cma archive, the Berlin gallery's records were destroyed during World War II.) Jakob Goldschmidt, New York, by 1941. Jacques Seligmann & Co., New York. Purchased by the CMA in 1949.
Accession Number
1949.189
Medium
oil on fabric
Dimensions
Unframed: 59.4 x 42.9 cm (23 3/8 x 16 7/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Gift of the Hanna Fund
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting French
Background & Context
Background Story
Woman Meditating belongs to the series of single-figure paintings that Corot produced in his later years, depicting idealized women in landscape settings that combine the atmospheric landscape of his outdoor studies with the figural compositions of his studio work. The seated woman—absorbed in thought, her attention directed inward rather than outward—epitomizes the mood of melancholy reverie that distinguishes Corot's late figure paintings from his more objective landscape studies. The landscape setting is rendered with the same silvery tonal unity as his outdoor work, but the figure gives the painting a narrative dimension that pure landscape lacks.
Cultural Impact
Corot's late figure paintings were among his most popular works during his lifetime and influenced the Symbolist painters of the 1880s and 1890s, who saw in them a model of poetic, dreamlike figuration that connected landscape and figure painting in a new way. The meditating woman became a recognizable Corot type—absorbed in thought, connected to her landscape setting, and existing in a timeless atmosphere that transcended the specificities of place and time.
Why It Matters
Woman Meditating is Corot's late figure painting at its most characteristic: a woman absorbed in thought in a landscape of silvery tonal unity, connecting the interior world of reverie with the exterior world of nature. The painting is simultaneously a landscape and a figure study, and it is the combination that makes it uniquely Corot.
