Sibylle

When it was painted

Around 1870, Corot was in his seventies. France was at war with Prussia, and Paris was under siege. The public knew him for silvery, misty landscapes of lakes and trees. Behind his studio door, though, he kept painting people, posing models in all sorts of costumes.

Look at how this woman sits. Her body is turned away, and only her head swings back over her shoulder toward us. The pose closely follows the Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In Corot's day, that picture was believed to be a self-portrait by Raphael. The Met describes Sibylle as one of Corot's most accomplished attempts at Raphael's manner.

X-rays have turned up a surprise underneath. In Corot's first version, the model was playing a cello. One hand held the neck of the instrument, and the other, slightly raised, held the bow. Corot painted over all of it and put a single flower in the hand that had held the neck.

He never finished the canvas, and he never signed it. After Corot died in 1875, it belonged to Alfred Robaut, the man who wrote his biography and catalogued his work. Robaut sold it to the dealer Durand-Ruel in 1899, and in 1903 it went to Henry and Louisine Havemeyer in New York.

When Louisine Havemeyer died in 1929, she left the painting to the Metropolitan Museum along with much of her collection. So take another look at the hand holding the flower, on the right. Somewhere under that paint is a hand that once held the neck of a cello.