Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Rain Effect

A grey, wet day on the main road through Louveciennes, just west of Paris, in 1870. There is no sun anywhere in the sky, the trees are bare, and the cobbles shine. People are out regardless. A woman in a white cap stands by the wall on the left, two more walk up the middle of the road, and on the right a man in a top hat strides along with a dog ahead of him. A carriage waits in the distance. Pissarro lived on this road and came back to it for its weather, and here he sets the scene down in separate, uneven strokes. Sterling and Francine Clark had bought the picture before their museum opened in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1955. In 1967 it went to New York for a Wildenstein & Company exhibition of the Clark's treasures, held to raise money for the Committee to Rescue Italian Art, which had been set up after the Arno flooded Florence in November 1966.