The Belfry of Douai

In the spring of 1871 Paris was in the hands of the Commune, and at the end of May the French army retook the city in a week of street fighting. Corot, then 74, had gone north to Douai to stay with his friend Alfred Robaut, and in April and May he painted this view of the town's Gothic belfry at the end of a narrow street.

Little of that spring's turmoil reaches the canvas. A white horse pulls a cart, a man and a woman have stopped to talk, and the clock face on the tower is just readable under a pale, clouded sky.

The picture stayed with his host, who spent years documenting the painter's work for a catalogue. It was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, three years after the artist's death, and the French state bought it at the sale of Robaut's collection in 1907.