The Louvre, Foggy Morning

In February 1901 Camille Pissarro was 70 and could no longer work outdoors for long. A recurring infection of the tear duct had troubled him for years, so he rented rooms in Paris and painted what he could see from the window. The last of those rooms was at 28 place Dauphine, on the island in the middle of the Seine. From its north-west window he had the river, the Pont Neuf and the long flank of the Louvre beyond it, and he painted that view about 30 times between 1900 and his death in November 1903. The picture hangs in Bogota now. It came with the 208 works the Colombian painter Fernando Botero gave to his country's central bank in 2000, 85 of them by other hands.