The Place du Havre, Paris

Early in 1893 Pissarro took a room for a few weeks at the Hôtel Garnier in Paris, close to the Gare Saint-Lazare, and painted the square below his window. The building cut off at the far left is the station. The square takes its name, as the neighbouring rue du Havre does, from the trains out of Saint-Lazare that ran to the port of Le Havre. By the 1890s his old Impressionist companions had all but given up the modern city as a subject, and Pissarro went back to it, filling the square with cabs, carriages and people on foot.

The canvas did not stay with him long. By 17 March it had been sold to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, whose gallery was just then showing Pissarro's recent work, this picture among it. In June 1894 Durand-Ruel sold it to the Chicago businessman Potter Palmer, and his heirs gave it to the Art Institute in 1922.