Villages

The Metropolitan Museum has a number of artworks that depict villages from different parts of the world. These artworks provide a glimpse into the different ways that villages have been designed and laid out over time. They also offer a look at how people have lived in villages throughout history, and how village life has changed over time.

A Village Street: Dardagny

    Corot was a tireless traveler, and the extension of the network of French railroads in the 1850s widened the range of his summer journeys.
    In 1852, 1857, and 1863, he visited Dardagny, a small village near Geneva.
    This view, essentially unchanged today, was probably painted on Corot's first visit.
   It is an excellent example of his remarkable ability to derive a poetic scene from a prosaic site

Pirna: The Obertor from the South

    Bellotto was Canaletto's nephew and student who himself was to become an internationally renown view painter.
    Between 1747 and 1758, he worked for the court of Dresden and painted the nearby village of Pirna, depicted here with its city gate, adjacent tower (known as the Obertor), church, and town hall.
    Friederich August II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, and Count Brühl, his prime minister, commissioned larger scale views of Pirna between 1753 and 1756.
    A private patron must have commissioned this reduced replica either concurrently or sometime in the 1760s.

Picquigny

    Thaulow earned great success with his depictions of the rivers and byways of northern France.
    This canvas shows the village of Picquigny, near Amiens on the river Somme, where the Norwegian painter worked for several weeks in the late autumn of 1899.
    The composition adopts a downward vantage point that emphasizes the eddying water and its ever-changing colors, reflections, and illumination.

View of Lormes

    This sketch is one of many views of the countryside and villages in the Morvan, the mountainous region of Burgundy where Corot had many relatives, and which he visited in the early 1840s.
    The sketch is rapidly executed and made outdoors.
    This sketch is one of many views of the countryside and villages in the Morvan, the mountainous region of Burgundy where Corot had many relatives, and which he visited in the early 1840s.

A Village in a Valley

    Rousseau was not yet twenty years old when he painted this study from nature during one of his many expeditions into the countryside around Paris in the late 1820s.
    It is probably the painting described as a view of the plain of Saint-Ouen from the hill of Batignolles, with the forest of Montmorency in the distance, that was included in the 1867 retrospective of his work.