Chartres Cathedral
The west front of Chartres cathedral seen across rough ground from a low mound — its two mismatched spires clear against the sky.
Notre-Dame de Chartres
The painting shows a real, identified place that you can find today. The exact spot the artist worked from is not necessarily known.
Chartres Cathedral — at a glance
- Artist
- Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875)
- Year
- 1830 (reworked 1872)
- Movement
- French landscape (Barbizon era)
- Place
- Chartres, France — below the cathedral of Notre-Dame
- Viewpoint
- Open ground south-west of the cathedral — the building is unchanged (World Heritage); foreground built up
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- c. 64 × 51 cm
- Now at
- Musée du Louvre, Paris
Overview
Chartres Cathedral is an unusually plain, direct picture by Camille Corot, first painted in 1830 during the political upheaval of that year and lightly reworked by him more than forty years later, in 1872. From a patch of waste ground with a small mound, a broken wall and a seated boy, it looks up at the towering west and south sides of the great Gothic cathedral, its two very different spires against a clear sky. It is oil on canvas, about 64 by 51 cm, and it hangs in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Where was Chartres Cathedral painted?
Scholarship Chartres is a town on the river Eure, south-west of Paris, and its cathedral of Notre-Dame — one of the most complete High Gothic buildings in existence, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site — dominates it from a low hill. Corot painted from open ground below and to the south-west, looking up at the flank and the west towers. The cathedral is unchanged; the rough foreground ground has since been built up and laid out, but the view of the building itself can still be found.
What is in the painting?
The cathedral fills the upper right two-thirds: buttresses, the long roof, the plain Romanesque south tower and the taller, elaborately carved later spire beside it, pale stone against blue. In the foreground, a bank of bare earth and grass, a heap of stones, a fragment of wall, and a boy in a smock sitting on the mound. A couple of small trees. The light is calm and even.
Look closely
The two spires
The plain Romanesque south tower and the taller, ornate later spire beside it — the cathedral's famous mismatch.
The seated boy
A boy in a smock sits on the earth mound in the foreground, ignoring the cathedral.
The rubble and broken wall
A heap of stones and a fragment of wall on the waste ground below the building.
Analysis
Composition and technique
A humble, empty foreground of earth and rubble beneath the vast, precisely drawn cathedral.
Scholarship Corot sets the ordinary, unpicturesque foreground — waste ground, a lounging boy — against the great building, and draws the architecture with a clear, quiet exactness. The reworking of 1872 mainly softened the sky and foreground; the structure and mood are those of 1830.
History & provenance
The painting was kept by Corot, bequeathed to a friend, and entered the Louvre in 1906; it hangs in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Sources
- Musée du Louvre, Paris — collection entry for Camille Corot, ‘La Cathédrale de Chartres’ (1830, reworked 1872)
- UNESCO World Heritage — Chartres Cathedral
Related paintings
Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
1831
Constable's storm-lit English cathedral of 1831 — the same year, a very different mood.
The road from Sèvres to Paris
1855
Corot's quiet later landscape near his family home — the same plain, unemphatic manner.
Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway
1843
Turner's 1844 picture — the other pole of what a nineteenth-century painter could do with a great structure.
More by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
The Bridge at Narni
The road from Sèvres to Paris
Recollection of Mortefontaine
