Allée de la Tour-du-Jongleur and the House of M. Musy, Louveciennes

For more than 60 years this picture was dated 1875. The catalogue of Pissarro's paintings published in 2005 moved it back to around 1869, when he was living at Louveciennes, west of Paris, and the Musée d'Orsay follows that date. The lane in the title is named after the Tour du Jongleur, a tower at the end of the Louveciennes aqueduct, built in the 1680s to carry water pumped from the Seine to the gardens of Marly and Versailles. The aqueduct had gone out of use in 1866, replaced by pipes underground, and the tower does not appear here. What Pissarro shows is the tall house of a Monsieur Musy behind its wall, a goat grazing under young trees, a woman sitting by the track, and, beyond the ploughed ground, figures at work among stacked timber and big cart wheels.