Dampfschiffe im Hafen von Rouen

In January 1896 Pissarro checked into the Hôtel de Paris in Rouen and painted much of what he saw straight from his window. He was 65 and troubled by a chronic eye infection that made working outdoors hard, so the window became his studio. What drew him was not the cathedral Monet had been painting a few years earlier but the working river below, the steamboats, the smoke, the quays stacked with cargo. Across the water you can make out the wharves of Saint-Sever, the industrial, working-class side of the city. Pissarro told his family he had found beautiful motifs in these quays that would make fine paintings, and he worked the port in every kind of weather that winter.