Still Life with Cup and Teapot

In 1899, the year he turned 69, Pissarro spent much of his time painting Paris. That January he rented an apartment at 204 Rue de Rivoli, facing the Tuileries Gardens, and from its windows he worked on a series of views of the gardens and the Louvre. Around the same time he also set up a few still lifes, among them a larger table with a coffee pot, dated 1900 and now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. This canvas, dated to about 1899, is much smaller, roughly 21 by 28 centimetres, and holds just a teapot and a cup on its saucer. It later went to Switzerland, into the collection that the industrialist Sidney Brown and his wife Jenny assembled in their villa at Baden, which opened to the public as the Museum Langmatt in 1990.