Château-Gaillard at Sunset

Richard the Lionheart, king of England and duke of Normandy, built Château-Gaillard in about two years at the end of the 1190s, on a chalk cliff above the Seine at Les Andelys, to bar the French king's way down the river to Rouen. In 1204, a few years after Richard's death, Philip Augustus took it after a long siege, and Normandy soon fell to France. Around 1600 Henri IV had much of what remained pulled down. By Daubigny's day it was a broken ruin on the hilltop, and the Museum of Fine Arts points out that he painted it almost as if it were one more rock on the hillside, there to catch the evening light. The museum counts four views of the castle by him, each in a different light, and this one, from around 1873, has the sun going down. The canvas is small and wide, 38 by 69 centimetres. It belonged to Alice Crowninshield Bradlee of Boston, the wife of Josiah Bradlee, who gave it to the museum in 1918.