Entrance to the Village of Osny

In 1919 the Paris dealers Durand-Ruel bought a group of canvases from the widow of Camille Pissarro, who had died 16 years before. Going through them, they found one with no signature that they were sure Pissarro had not painted. When Madame Pissarro next came to Paris they asked her about it, and she told them it was by Gauguin, a present he had given her husband during his stay at Pontoise. This is that picture. Gauguin was then a beginner in his thirties, and Pissarro, 18 years older, was the friend teaching him how to look. In the summer of 1883 Gauguin visited him at Osny, a village on the north-western edge of Pontoise, and this road into the village is painted the way Pissarro worked at the time, in small, lively strokes of colour, with nothing grand for a subject. The muddle outlived the widow's answer. When the Boston collector John Taylor Spaulding bought the canvas in 1921, the dealers first wrote to him that Pissarro had sold it to the opera singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure. Only in 1933 did they send him the story Madame Pissarro had told.