Der Wald

Pissarro dated this 1870. In September of that year he left his house at Louveciennes, west of Paris, ahead of the advancing Prussian army and took his family to London. He came back in June 1871 to find the place had been used as a billet and most of the roughly 1,500 canvases stored there were gone. Soldiers were said to have laid some of them in the muddy garden to walk on. Almost nothing he painted before that autumn survives. This forest interior is in Johannesburg, in a gallery whose collection was shown to the public in 1910, five years before there was a building to put it in.