A Place in La Roche-Guyon

This is a quiet village square at La Roche-Guyon, a bend in the Seine northwest of Paris, painted in 1867. Impressionism had no name yet. Its first group show was still seven years off. Pissarro, then about 37 and far from famous, worked here outdoors alongside a young Paul Cezanne and their friend Antoine Guillemet, all of them painting the ordinary place in front of them rather than a grand subject. The canvas is built from sober greys and greens, the light even and undramatic, a plain street corner taken seriously. The picture had a hard later life. It passed through the collection of the French lawyer Armand Dorville, whose estate was sold under the German occupation in 1942, and in 2021 the Berlin museum returned it to his heirs before reacquiring it.