Entrance to the Village of Voisins, Yvelines

Two years before this quiet road, Camille Pissarro had lost almost everything. When the Franco-Prussian War reached Louveciennes in 1870 he fled, and the soldiers billeted in his house used his stored canvases as floor mats and aprons. As many as 1,500 paintings, most of his life's work until then, were destroyed. He returned in 1871, and this is the village of Voisins nearby, the bare winter trees and a road running dead straight into the houses. He built the whole picture on that road, the way his old teacher Corot liked to send a lane into the distance. Within months he would leave Louveciennes for Pontoise, where he stayed the next ten years.