Das Landgut von Saulce

Henri-Joseph Harpignies was a French landscape painter of the Barbizon School and a close friend of Corot, with whom he traveled to Italy in 1860. His parents wanted him to go into business. He didn't start painting until he was twenty-seven, and he lived to ninety-seven. Das Landgut von Saulce (The Estate at Saulce) shows a French country estate in flat green fields under a wide, pale sky — stone farm buildings with an orange-red roof at center-left, a larger stone structure at right, sheep grazing in the middle distance, and a row of dark trees along the horizon. The foreground is dry grass and scrub. It's a quiet, horizontal painting with most of the compositional weight in the low band of buildings and the rest given over to sky.