Landscape at Pontoise

Most Impressionist paintings in Paris hang across the river at the Musée d'Orsay, so this one is a small surprise. It stays in the Louvre because of the couple who gave it. Hélène and Victor Lyon collected everything from Venetian city views to Degas and Monet, and they gave their pictures to the French state on condition that the collection never be split up. It arrived in 1977 and hangs with the rest of their gift in Room 903 of the Sully wing. Pissarro painted it in 1877 at Pontoise, a market town on the Oise northwest of Paris. A pale, clouded sky takes up more than half the canvas. Below it, rows of young fruit trees are in blossom, and a village sits low in the valley. His signature and the date are in the lower right corner.