Chartres Cathedral

Corot painted this in 1830, the summer the July Revolution drove Charles X from the throne and threw Paris into turmoil. Corot, then in his thirties, left the city for Chartres and set up in front of the cathedral's west front in the quiet afternoon light. Then he kept the canvas. More than 40 years later, in 1872, old and celebrated by now, he took it out again, added a strip of canvas to enlarge it, and painted a small seated figure into the foreground. So the picture carries two moments of one life, the young man escaping a revolution and the old master coming back to finish the job. The two towers rise at uneven heights, one older and plainer, the other taller and more worked, exactly as they do on the cathedral itself.