A Peasant Woman

In this pensive study, a woman is dressed in traditional Italian costume, including a dark blue bodice trimmed with pale yellow with attached shoulder straps. The dress probably comes from the town of Sonnino, south of Rome. The distinctive headdress is a tovaglia, which consisted of a piece of folded linen or other cloth worn flat on the head and covering the neck. It remained popular in Italy during the nineteenth century. From the late eighteenth century, many French artists who visited Italy painted people wearing traditional Italian costume. With Italian migration to France increasing from the middle of the century, this fascination with such costume escalated, particularly as many women brought their picturesque dress with them. Corot was among those artists who painted studies of such women wearing folk costume; Italian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve (L'Italienne) is one example.Although this painting entered the National Gallery’s collection as a work by Corot himself it is now thought to be by an imitator. In contrast to the bright vivid colour which Corot himself used in his images of women, the colours here here are extremely restrained. In addition, the technique is delicate and the application of paint thin and even throughout, which is unlike the way he paints in Italian Woman. This work probably dates from the early years of the twentieth century, a period when the appeal of Corot’s late silvery landscapes was on the wane, and the demand for his late figure paintings was on the rise.