Barges at La Roche-Guyon

In 1863 Pissarro was in his early thirties and still painting in the calm, earthy manner of the older landscape painters he admired. This stretch of the Seine lies near La Roche-Guyon, downstream from Paris. A dark barge is moored at the bank, and a bargeman comes down the grassy slope with a heavy sack on his back to join the crew. Seven years later the picture came close to being lost. When war broke out in 1870, Pissarro left for London, and Prussian troops were quartered in his house at Louveciennes, west of Paris. By the usual account he later recovered only about 40 of the roughly 1,500 canvases he had left there, and this barge is one of them. The town of Pontoise bought it in 1979, and in its museum it has hung in the first room, between paintings by Corot and Daubigny.