Landscape
1858. Oil on canvas.Room 063A
Built on a high and inaccessible mountain, the castle of Montsegur, one of the last strongholds of the Cathars (a Christian religious sect with gnostic elements that spread across Western Europe in the eleventh century), provides the title for this painting, although the real focus of the work is not the castle but the rugged topography of this area of southern France, which the painter describer accurately through successive planes of light and shadow.