Louveciennes

Louveciennes sits on the slope above the Seine, west of Paris, and Pissarro had been renting a house there on the route de Versailles since 1869. In July 1870 France declared war on Prussia. By September the emperor had surrendered at Sedan and German troops were moving on Paris. Pissarro got his family out to Brittany and then to London, and left the house and everything in it. Soldiers were quartered there through the winter and used it as a butchery. The canvases stacked inside went down on the muddy garden path as duckboards, and some were worn as aprons. He had left around 1,500 paintings behind. When he came back in the summer of 1871, about 40 of them were still usable.