Corfu with the Fortress

The fortress in this view was a British post. The Ionian Islands had been under British protection since 1815, with their own senate and a lord high commissioner sent out from London, and Britain kept the right to garrison the forts, which it rebuilt and extended. The museum dates the painting no more precisely than after 1848, years when the islands were restless. In September 1848 there were clashes with the garrison on Cephalonia, and a rising there in August 1849 was put down under martial law. Pige was a Tyrolean who had settled in the Greek kingdom and made his living from the island families. Corfu passed to Greece in 1864, two years after he died, and the terms of the handover required the island to be neutral and its fortifications razed, so British engineers blew up a good part of them before they sailed.