Agostina
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 132.4 x 97.6 cm (52 1/8 x 38 7/16 in.) framed: 173.7 x 138.4 cm (68 3/8 x 54 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Department
CF
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Chester Dale Collection
Accession Number
1963.10.108
Art Historical Context
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's *Agostina* (1866) is a captivating oil-on-canvas portrait that exemplifies the artist's mastery in his later years. Measuring 132.4 x 97.6 cm, this large-scale work captures a young woman—likely the Italian model Agostina Segatori—in a moment of quiet introspection, gazing thoughtfully into the distance. Corot, a leading figure of the Barbizon School and a bridge between Romanticism and Impressionism, painted this during a period when he increasingly focused on luminous portraits alongside his renowned landscapes. The painting's artistic significance lies in Coro...
About the Artist
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, born on July 16, 1796, in Paris to a prosperous bourgeois family—his father a former wig-maker turned draper and his mother a successful milliner—was initially apprenticed in the textile trade but pursued art from his mid-twenties with family support. He studied under the neoclassical landscapist Achille Etna Michallon in 1821–1822, who taught him to sketch outdoors in...