After a false start as an apprentice cloth merchant, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot resolved to become a painter at age twenty-six. This work is one in a series he made in Lormes, a village in central France situated within the Morvan Regional Natural Park. Sunlight—striking the bark of a tree, highlighting a tuft of grass, or flooding the rocky stream bank—is an important element in this private slice of nature. The intimate mood fits Corot’s contemporary reputation as a gentle, introspective painter of the French countryside.