The Four Times of Day: Morning

This is the first in a series of four panels illustrating the different times of day that Corot painted for his friend, fellow artist Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. Two tall trees with full foliage on the left of the panel are offset by two smaller trees on the right. Corot's use of trees on either side of the picture to create a vista framing the view beyond is a compositional device used by classical landscape painters, such as Claude.

Starting from a thin and sketchily applied brown underpaint, Corot built up the composition with thicker, more opaque paint, but much of the picture remains an almost monochrome brownish-green. The most intense colour is the band of cadmium yellow-orange on the ho...