View of Château d'Arques near Dieppe

Trained in the workshops of Guérin and Gros, Paul Huet developed a sensitivity that he turned towards landscape, where he soon became one of the torchbearers of the new Romantic school.

Like many artists of his time, he was deeply influenced by Normandy, where he stayed from 1825 onwards, and whose landscapes echoed the English painting his generation was discovering through John Constable's Salon entries and the presence in Paris of British artists such as Bonington.

The valley of the Château d'Arques-La Bataille, built in the 12th century and witness to Henri IV's victory over the Catholic League during the Wars of Religion in 1589, was the perfect setting for the picturesque aspirations of the Romantic and Picturesque Travels in Ancient France, in which Nodier and Taylor listed ruined sites where nature and history met. Huet went there in 1829 during a stay with Dumas, and drew from the memory of this inhabited nature a vast composition intended for the Diorama Montesquieu, a short-lived enterprise that closed its doors shortly after its inauguration in 1830. The painting was then transferred to the Gaité, where it was destroyed in a fire.

In 1838, the French government commissioned a reduction of his famous painting, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1840 to great acclaim. The mastery of atmospheric effects and the accuracy of the changing light of the Normandy climate enliven a nature "as it should be understood, imbued with reality and penetrated with poetry", as his friend Victor Hugo said of him. The wet skies of stormy gray and the intense greens of the Normandy bocage find one of their most vivid transcriptions under his brush.

The painting was sent to Orléans as early as 1840, no doubt at the request of Paul-Horace Demadières-Miron, director from 1838 to 1852, with whom Romantic painting made its debut on the Museum's walls.