Flood at Saint-Ouen-L'Aumône

Pissarro painted this in 1873, the year before he and his friends mounted the Paris show that got them named Impressionists. He was living at Pontoise, on the river Oise north of the capital, back from London where he had waited out the Franco-Prussian War. Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone sat just across the water, and in the wet months its low fields went under. He set down that ordinary flood without fuss: a single broad tree in front, the blue-green water taking the colour of an overcast sky, a distant line of buildings on the horizon. The Oise spilled over these plains most winters, and Pissarro came back to paint the flooded valley more than once.