Cathedral at le Puy

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame at le Puy was built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and was a major pilgrimage site in the late 1500s. James Carroll Beckwith and his wife made their own “pilgrimage” to France in 1911, with stops in Avignon, Nîmes, and le Puy. (Franchi and Weber, Intimate Revelations: The Art of Carroll Beckwith (1852-1917), 1999) He painted this scene on the spot one July afternoon and captured the fleeting summer light as it pierced the gray clouds and made the medieval rooftops glisten.