The Marguerite Church, Knocke

In June 1894 the president of France, Sadi Carnot, was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist, and the country turned hard against anyone tied to anarchist circles. Pissarro, then 64, had long moved in exactly those circles, and within weeks he crossed into Belgium and settled at Knokke, a small resort on the North Sea, from July to September. This is one of the canvases he made there, the village church rising over the low houses. He worked outdoors through the summer, keeping to the plain motifs of the town while the trials of suspected anarchists filled the papers back home. He came back to France that October. The painting later entered the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, among his late landscapes.