Saint-Quentin-des-Prés (Oise), près de Gournay-en-Bray

Saint-Quentin-des-Prés (Oise), près de Gournay-en-Bray is a prime example of the tranquil and reassuring images that contributed greatly to Corot's fame. Pictures of tidy rural villages, farms, barnyards and kitchen yards appear frequently in the last twenty years of the artist's life, almost always populated with peasants going about their daily lives. These visions of timeless rural contentment appealed strongly to the French sensibility, and their rustic simplicity offered an alternative to the bustle of modern life. These rural scenes were a specialty of the painters of the Barbizon school, and it is with scenes such as Saint-Quentin-des-Prés (Oise), près de Gournay-en-Bray that Corot most nearly approached the artistic temperament of his contemporaries. There is also a similarity with the painters of the French Realist tradition in the depiction of a simpler way of life. It is perhaps in these paintings that Corot comes closest to the essence of the paintings of Jean-François Millet. While Millet monumentalized the peasant and the nobility of his labor, Corot here has emphasized the peace and serenity of a way of life. Although the emphasis is different, the sentiment remains the same.
The device of a path or track leading upward and backward into the composition, often with a gentle turn to punctuate the recession, was a recurring motif in Corot’s oeuvre. It was also a device adopted by Camille Pissarro, who was a frequent visitor to Corot’s studio in the early 1860s. Pissarro was greatly influenced by the older masters and in the Salon of 1864, Pissarro went so far as to register himself as the pupil of Corot (élève de Corot).
According to Robaut, (op. cit., p. 58), Corot painted this picture as an affectionate souvenir of a romantic area surrounding a stretch of the river Oise that particularly appealed to him. Corot christened the area Vallon des nymphes, and the original owner of the work was Émile de Nevers, a close friend of Corot and the proprietor of a small mill situated on the river where Corot would often go and stay to paint and rest.