Die Boieldieu-Brücke in Rouen bei Regenwetter

In the early months of 1896 Pissarro took a room at the Hotel de Paris in Rouen, overlooking the Seine, and painted what he saw from the window. What he chose to look at is telling. Not a cathedral or a picturesque old quay, but the working, industrial heart of the town: the iron Pont Boieldieu, only about a decade old, the smoking quays, the railway station across the water. He painted the same view over and over in different light and weather, and this is the rainy version, the bridge and the crowd greyed and softened by wet air. By now Pissarro was in his mid-sixties. After years of experimenting with the tight dots of Pointillism he had come back to a looser Impressionist touch, and you can see it in the way the reflections break up on the wet river.