Distant view of Mantes Cathedral

Around 1860 Corot was in his sixties and, after decades of hard travel, finally celebrated in Paris. He was also settling into the kind of picture he would be loved for: hazy, silver-toned, more remembered than observed. Mantes sits on the Seine about 30 miles west of the city, and its Gothic collegiate church had drawn him back again and again since the 1840s. Here he keeps the cathedral at a distance, letting his feathery trees rise in front of it, so the great stone building reads as a pale grey mass through the leaves rather than a monument to be catalogued. The water, the soft light and the loose foliage matter to him as much as the architecture. By 1860 he had painted Mantes so often that the cathedral came to him almost from memory, one more of the quiet river views that fill his last years.