Early in his career, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot sought to capture the appearance of the physical world with an unblinking directness that seems to anticipate the photograph. During the 1830s he traveled in northern France, painting detailed architectural studies that in their simple volumetric clarity also recall the cityscapes and architectural views of seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Monsieur Henry was a cloth manufacturer, proud of his provincial prosperity, whose house and factory in Soissons, a suburb of Reims, he commissioned the artist to paint in 1833. A pendant showing another view of his property and, across the fields, the spires of Soissons Cathedral, is in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo. Regarding Corot as an amateur who required no compensation, Henry neglected to pay him for the works, now considered to be among the finest of the artist's early career. Corot himself repainted parts of this picture in 1871, when he came to fear it looked too much like the kind of picture postcard that, ironically, had not been invented when he first worked on the canvas. Christopher Riopelle, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 188.