Die Straße nahe der Eisenbahn, Schneeeffekt, Osny

Pissarro painted this road at Osny, on the edge of Pontoise, in the snow of 1873, one of hundreds of canvases he made within a few kilometres of that town. What happened to it afterwards is the less ordinary part. Kojiro Matsukata, who ran a shipyard in Kobe, bought European art on an enormous scale after the First World War and left much of it in Paris. The French government sequestered those works at the end of the Second World War as enemy property. In 1959 France handed 375 of them back to Japan on the condition that a French architect design the building to hold them. Le Corbusier took the job, and the snow at Osny has been in his museum in Tokyo ever since.