The laundry Bazincourt

The small building among the trees is a lavoir, the covered washhouse where the women of a French village brought their linen down to the water. This one stood at Bazincourt, on the river Epte, a short walk from Éragny, where Pissarro had lived since 1884. He painted it in 1900, the year Paris was taken over by the Exposition Universelle, and signed and dated the canvas in the lower right corner. By then he was about 70, and he split his year between views of Paris painted from rented windows above the Tuileries and the Seine, and summers back in the Epte valley. The picture was shown in Paris in 1907, four years after his death, at the gallery of the dealer Eugène Blot. It later belonged to Antonin Personnaz, a collector from Bayonne who had bought Impressionist painting early and was also a keen photographer. When Personnaz died in 1937 he left his collection to the Louvre, and this canvas came to the state with it.