Les deux bûcherons (The Two Woodcutters), ca. 1840

Corot surveys the undulating landscape from an elevated vantage point. In the foreground, rendered in dark greens and earthy hues, two woodcutters are toiling away on a felled tree. The hills of the middle ground sloping away to the left, by contrast, are bathed in bright light. On the hilltop is a walled village, adumbrated by just a few deft brushstrokes. The terrain beyond seems to fall away into an airy band of haze, above which, and below the long-hanging clouds higher up, we are afforded a vision of the seemingly endless depths of the sky. Searching for something to latch onto, the eye alights on the copse on the left. Only here is the sudden and nuance-free transition from the coolness and shade of the foreground to the warmth and light of the middle ground overcome. Whether it is the angle of the woodcutters bent over their log or the small, forlorn-looking rider traversing the landscape, our gaze, in defiance of some unfathomable resistance, is inexorably drawn back to the left-hand side of the painting. Is this tree, standing in a landscape whose defining feature seems to be its emptiness, the true subject of the work? Corot had previously taken woodcutters as his theme when painting the Forest of Fontainbleau. There, he connected them with his critique of the planned clearing of that area of woodland, a concern shared by fellow artists such as Théodore Rousseau, who successfully campaigned for its preservation.¹ Corot undoubtedly ranks among the great landscape painters of the nineteenth century and that this is what he again had in mind when he painted this almost bare landscape is certainly conceivable.²