Corot, France’s leading landscape painter, also, from the 1830s, produced portraits and paintings of human figures. From the 1850s, he painted imaginary subjects. Here a young woman in the woods is smiling; Corot painted it in his atelier, using a professional model dressed as an Italian peasant. In it he returns to the subject of his Young Italian Woman Standing (1825-26, private collection), a study he made in Italy when much younger. This work presents his memories of Italy, where he spent his youth, and the lyrical world he explored in the last years of his life.