Snow at Louveciennes

Pissarro painted this in the winter around 1870 at Louveciennes, the village just west of Paris where he had settled with his family. For a couple of years he had been working the same road, the Route de Versailles, in every weather, and here it is under fresh snow, the palette narrowed to whites, greys and cold browns, a single figure walking beneath a screen of bare trees. Within months that quiet was gone. The Franco-Prussian war reached the area, and Pissarro fled with his family to London. When he came back, Prussian soldiers had been living in his house, and a great deal of the work he had stored there was destroyed. Relatively little of what he painted at Louveciennes in these years survived. This small snow scene is one that did, and it hangs now at the Art Institute of Chicago.