The Bridge at Mantes

The bridge in this picture was already very old when Corot painted it. A crossing between Mantes and Limay is recorded by 1050, and at full length it ran over 37 spans in three sections, from bank to island to bank. Like many bridges on the lower Seine it carried mills built over its piers. The last of them went into the river in 1870, when a barge struck its pilings. Corot's view is dated only broadly, between 1850 and 1875, and he looks at the arches through a screen of dark trunks on the near bank. The single bright spot is the red cap of a boatman sitting by his boat below. In 1940 French engineers blew up two of the surviving arches to slow the German advance, and they were never rebuilt.