Corot's Compare Contrast

Corot’s piece was painted during the Impressionist period and is comparable to several well known Impressionist paintings. For instance, Olympia, by Edouard Manet, contains hard outlines and little to no modeling by chiaroscuro. If there is modeling, it is done with muted colors and still contains hard edges. Corot’s painting also contains hard edges around the figure, but has slightly more modeling with shadows and highlights. At the time Impressionism was starting to become more popular, more and more artists were becoming influenced by Japanese woodblock prints and the hard outlines created in such prints. With this influence, painters were beginning to include less chiaroscuro and more harsh outlines, like in Olympia and a little in Springtime
The artist uses an analogous color scheme of blues, greens, and yellows to paint this piece. The focal point of the painting is the nude male figure sitting on a cluster of boulders in the right hand side of the composition. Behind him, stand two large, yellow and blue trees. On the left hand side of the composition, another boulder and one more tree occupy the remaining space in the foreground. The middle ground is entirely composed of a sparkling blue and green lake. The sun reflects off the water down the center of composition. In the background, a large castle sits atop a cliff, positioned just to the left of the center of the painting. The nude figure is staring up at this castle, his posture reflecting his pleasant, dreamlike thoughts while admiring the castle. The distribution of color, such as more yellows in one area and more blues in another, allows the painting to feel balanced and the color scheme not to be too harsh on the viewer's’
The colors are haphazardly arranged about the composition and are very saturated, except for the amorphous squiggles of tinted red, blue, and yellow in the sky. The composition contains nine figures lounging and enjoying their time in their colorful world. One of the figures, a bright red-orange fellow, sits upon a tree stump, pointing to the upper left hand corner of the piece. A deep blue pond begins in the lower left hand corner and occupies two thirds of the foreground. In the middle ground are the remaining figures. There are two other figures painted in the bright red-orange color, but the others are pale pink, yellow, blue, and violet. The focal point of the composition is the lone blue figure, who sits in the middle of the painting, amidst the warmly colored figures, and is holding a gray guitar. In the landscape, a tree reaches into the sky on the left side of the composition while a hill or mountain stretches up on the right side. This piece is asymmetrical in visual balance, but also in application of color, which can only be described as