Chestnut Copse in Winter, Louveciennes

When Pissarro came back to Louveciennes in June 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, he found his house wrecked. Prussian troops had used it as a stable and a barracks, and hundreds of the canvases he had left there were gone. His sister-in-law had already written to warn him that doors, shutters, staircases and floors were missing and the place could not be lived in. This winter scene of bare chestnut trees and thin snow belongs to the months after that return, when he took up the village and its woods again as his subject. The chestnut groves at Louveciennes were a motif he painted more than once, in 1870 and again in 1872. He signed and dated this canvas 1872 in the lower left corner, the same year he moved his family on to Pontoise, in July.