fckyeaharthistory:

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - Woman Reading in a Landscape,1869. Oil on canvas

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 

When the seventy-two-year-old Corot showed “A Woman Reading” at the Salon of 1869, the critic Théophile Gautier praised its naïveté and its color but criticized the faulty drawing of the figure, noting the rarity of figures in Corot’s work. Although the artist had painted similar figure studies after the late 1850s, this was the first and one of the very few that he exhibited. 

Close examination of the surface reveals that Corot reworked the landscape. A photograph of the painting when it was exhibited at the Salon indicates that originally there was a willow at the left whose foliage nearly covered the sky, and a mass of trees at the right. A lithographic copy of the painting, made by Emile Vernier in 1870, reproduces it with the present, open sky; thus, Corot must have repainted the work immediately after he retrieved it from the Salon.