Spring, Morning, Cloudy, Éragny

Paris in the spring of 1900 was hosting the Exposition Universelle, and Pissarro had been working through it from a rented apartment on the rue de Rivoli, painting the Tuileries and the traffic under his window. In May or June he went back to Éragny-sur-Epte, about 70 kilometres to the north-west, where he had lived since 1884, and painted the orchard behind his own house. The title is a set of conditions rather than a name: the season, the hour, the weather, the place. He kept the view and changed those, and in 1900 alone he made five spring versions of the Éragny landscape and four autumn ones. He worked this one from the studio he had fitted out in a barn, a habit forced on him by a chronic infection of the tear duct that made long days outdoors hard. He was 69 that spring, and what he wanted out of it was the apple blossom holding its brightness under a wet, overcast morning.