Honfleur: Der Kalvarienberg

On the Côte de Grâce, the wooded height above Honfleur in Normandy, stands a small shrine and calvary first raised in 1628, a place where families came to pray for men who had gone to sea. The young Corot climbed up here to paint it directly from nature, out in the open air, decades before the Impressionists made that an ordinary thing for a painter to do. Beyond the shrine the land falls away toward the mouth of the Seine, with the roofs of Le Havre faint across the water. He worked on the little panel beside a friend, the Neapolitan painter Gabriele Smargiassi, the two of them out on the hill together.