Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, England
1874
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1874
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
You see a crumbling stone castle half-swallowed by ivy, its towers rising from a quiet lake. Braun took this picture in the 1870s, long after Sir Walter Scott’s novel made the ruins famous. Tourists already knew the story of Queen Elizabeth and her favorite, Robert Dudley—so the painting feels like a postcard from a place everyone had read about. Look up the subject of france to see how other artists painted castles that lived more in books than in bricks.
