Morning Sunlight on the Snow, Éragny-sur-Epte

February 1895 was the coldest month the Paris region had known since 1740. It froze every day, the Seine iced over for two weeks, and on the 17th horse-drawn carriages drove across it near Argenteuil. Pissarro spent that winter at Éragny, about 70 kilometres north-west of Paris, and this snow is from it. The canvas was long dated 1894, until the catalogue of his work found in his dealer's records that Durand-Ruel bought it from him on 10 April 1895, which matches the 95 painted beside the signature at the lower left. A woman walks away from us across the snow with a bucket in each hand, her arms pulled straight by the weight. Morning sun comes through the bare poplars, and the whites run from pink to icy blue. The museum thinks he painted it from the window of his studio. John Pickering Lyman of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, bought it in 1910, and his sister Theodora gave it to the museum in 1919.