Chestnut Trees at Louveciennes, Spring

Pissarro painted this in the spring of 1870, in the park of old chestnut trees near his house at Louveciennes, a small town just west of Paris where he was then living. The branches are only starting to green, a couple strolls under a parasol, everything quiet. Within a few months that quiet was gone. In July war broke out between France and Prussia, and by autumn the fighting drove Pissarro to flee with his family to London. Prussian troops moved into his abandoned house and used it as a slaughterhouse, and the canvases he had left behind were mostly destroyed. He later reckoned that only around 40 paintings survived out of some 1,500 built up over years of work. This spring scene was painted just before all of that, and it is one of the few from those years still around.