Die Treppe von Chartres

By 1933 Soutine was spending long stretches at Lèves, a village just outside Chartres, in the house of Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing, the collectors who had taken him up and kept buying his work. The cathedral is what he is known for from those years, painted from below and leaning. This is the town underneath it, one of the stepped lanes that climbs from the lower streets toward the cathedral hill.

He worked wet, piling fresh paint into paint that had not set, and his walls and steps tilt and slide as a result. The museum that owns the picture stands in the old bishop's palace, a minute's walk from the cathedral he kept going back to.