Soulier's photograph shows the charred remains of the once lavish audience hall of the Council of State in the Palais d'Orsay, a building begun by Napoleon I, completed in 1840 under King Louis-Philippe, and burned by the Communards on May 23, 1871. In the last years of the nineteenth century, these ruins were replaced by a new railway station, the Gare d'Orsay, which, in turn, was transformed in the 1980s into the Musée d'Orsay, the French national museum for art made between 1848 and 1914.