Amiens, a street scene with numerous figures on a bridge

Market stalls crowd the left side of this street in Amiens, their striped awnings pulled out over baskets and barrels while women in white caps stand about talking. Beyond them, a stone bridge carries a knot of figures across the water, and further still the great cathedral of Notre-Dame rises in a pale haze, its towers almost dissolving into the sky. Caleb Robert Stanley painted it around the middle of the nineteenth century, working in the British topographical tradition: careful, recognisable views of real places, made for travellers and armchair travellers alike. The sunlight falls from the right and picks out the church spire, the tiled roofs and a small figure in red down by the riverbank, doing laundry or fetching water.

Stanley built a career on exactly this kind of picture, touring France, Germany and Italy and bringing home views that sold well at the Royal Academy and the British Institution. Queen Victoria bought several of his works, which says something about the appetite for tidy continental scenery in Victorian Britain. Amiens was a natural subject: the Somme runs through the old town in a web of canals, and market gardeners from the hortillonnages brought their produce in by boat, so the bustle here has a practical reason behind it. The painting is less about drama than about accuracy with a flattering light, and the brown, honeyed tone throughout is very much the taste of its moment.