Quai des Orfevres and Pont Saint-Michel

Corot barely painted Paris. Fewer than five pictures of the city are known, and this is one of them, signed and dated 1833, the year the Salon awarded him a second-class medal. He worked it up indoors from a sketch made on the spot, in oil on paper that was later laid down on canvas. Most of what he recorded is gone. The narrow four-arched Pont Saint-Michel was taken down in 1857 and rebuilt with three wider arches to suit Napoleon III's new boulevards. The low building on the quay beside the bridge was the Paris morgue, where bodies pulled from the Seine were laid out behind glass for anyone who cared to walk in off the street.