Ruins of the Château de Pierrefonds

The Château de Pierrefonds sits about 45 miles northeast of Paris, and when Corot first painted it, early in his career, it was a genuine ruin, a medieval fortress left broken since the 17th century and exactly the kind of romantic, crumbling subject his generation loved. He worked out of doors, in front of the real thing, catching the soft light on the shattered towers. Then history overtook the picture. In the late 1850s Napoleon III handed the castle to the architect Viollet-le-Duc, who rebuilt it into the tall, turreted château that stands there today. When Corot returned to this canvas in the 1860s to rework it, the ruin he had painted no longer existed anywhere but here.