Corot painted prolifically, taking many trips to fuel his painting, which transformed constantly without rigidly adhering to any specific style. MASP has five works by the artist: three portraits, a landscape and a still life. In Gypsy Girl with a Mandolin (1874), a portrait of Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson (1843-1921), the ochers and reds evince a calculated sobriety. Careful use of color is also the high point of Rose in un Bicchiere (1874), in which the cup’s transparency and the variation between thin and solid swatches of color convey a sensation of moistness. The uniform background highlights the color of each leaf and petal. The vertical and horizontal lines, coupled with the cup’s off-center placement, lend this picture a casual and intimist aspect. It is one of just three paintings of flowers by the artist. In Landscape with Peasant Girl (1861) the gradation of blues between the sky and hills in the background is echoed in that of the greens of the pasture in the middle of the canvas. The horizontal division is the axis for a mirroring both in terms of color and composition: the green field slopes down to the right while the blue line of the faraway hills slopes upward at the same angle. The tree at the center connects the two planes, while the working peasant girl represents labor as a constitutive element of this landscape.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
By Luciano Migliaccio
Perhaps the model for the painting Gypsy with a Mandolin was Swedish operatic soprano Kristina Nilsson (1843-1921), who began her professional career in Paris, in 1864 and later became famous all over Europe and America. On his trip to Holland, Corot was accompanied by painter and lithographer H. J. C. Dutilleux, a very close friend of Delacroix, who reported that Corot’s excitement over the work of Rembrandt made an indelible impression on him. Corot’s models included Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in Woman with a Pearl (1868-1870, Paris, Louvre) and evoked on the right hand of the mandolin player, as well as Raphael and the 16th-century Venetian painters (whose influence is also observed in the gypsy). Rembrandt was one of the most influential; another was Delacroix (Meier-Graefe, 1930). Jamot (1936, n. 54) noted that Vermeer’s female figures also strongly influenced Corot’s work.
This canvas is known to have inspired Georges Braque’s famous Hommage à Corot (1922, Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne), although here the musical instrument is a guitar. Actually, a number of works by Braque, produced over a decade or more, are clearly based on Corot’s painting. The first is possibly a drawing titled Woman with Mandolin, (1913), followed by a sketch (1917, Paris, private collection), and a canvas (1918, Basel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung), (Leymarie 1974, n. 15). This goes to show that Braque had pondered Corot’s picture well before the 1920s. Juan Gris was also impressed by Corot’s work when doing his Mandolin Player (1916, Basel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung). The influence of Corot on these two masters of Cubism evinces the modern nature of his pictorial development. While controlling composition procedures and color relations, which he used to build his images and assure perfection and finishing, Corot set himself apart even from his contemporaries who responded to the appeal of realism, from Courbet to the Impressionists (Cipriani 1958). This is the lesson learned from Poussin’s Classicism and bequeathed to 20th-century artists. From Braque to Morandi, from the vanguards to the return of order, this devotion to the historical values of form as a human experience that can only be transmitted by visual media is the seed that germinated in the finest 20th-century painting.
— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998
