Under the curatorship of Sebastian Allard, General Heritage Curator and Director of the Department of Paintings in the Musée du Louvre, the exhibition ‘Corot. Le peintre et ses modèles’ (‘Corot: the painter and his models’) will be the first Parisian event devoted to the artist’s work since the major retrospective held in 1996 in the Grand Palais. Scheduled to be held in the Musée Marmottan Monet between 8 February and 8 July 2018, the exhibition will bring together an exceptional ensemble of figurative paintings and will highlight the most intimate, secret, and modern aspects of the artist’s works.

The exhibition will display around sixty of these figure-based works, loaned by the most prestigious public and private collections in Europe and the United States (such as the Musée du Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Belvedere in Vienna, and the Bührle Foundation in Zurich), with the intention of exploring this relatively unknown side of the artist’s oeuvre. There will be masterpieces such as the famous Femme à la Perle (Woman With a Pearl), the Louvre’s Dame en Bleu (Lady in Blue), and the National Gallery’s impressive Italienne (Italian Woman), which was once held in the collection of the painter Lucian Freud, along with other works that are just as splendid but rarely seen, such as his nudes.