A Pensive Girl

Against a hazy gray-green background, a girl with a red scarf wrapped around her head stands looking down. She wears a dark bodice with reddish sleeves and a spreading blue-gray skirt, and her eyes are cast on her hands.

From around 1850, Corot's figure paintings began to change: details were no longer carefully worked out, and the figures took on allegorical and symbolic qualities. The landscape around the figure is also painted not as a specific place but as the atmosphere of an imagined nature. In his later years, rheumatic attacks limited his outdoor sketching, and he increasingly had models pose indoors. Paintings of the late 1860s belong to this period.

The composition closely resembles A Shepherdess Reading (c. 1855-65) in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur, but the poetic, contemplative atmosphere is said to be deeper in this work. Behind the model, a few thin lines and small touches of yellow ochre have been added, which the commentary says call to mind the tree trunks and branches and the sense of the forest in Corot's landscapes.