The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon

The Tuileries garden, laid out in the seventeenth century between the Louvre and what is now the Place de la Concorde, is one of the oldest public gardens in Paris. In the winter of 1899 Pissarro rented an apartment on the rue de Rivoli that looked straight down onto it and stayed the season. From that window he painted six versions of this view, watching the same bare trees and gravel walks shift under the light of the short winter days. On the far side the twin steeples of the church of Sainte-Clotilde rise into a wide, cold sky. Down in the garden a few small figures move along the paths, dark against the pale ground.