The Pont-Neuf, Mist (Second Series)

By the turn of the century Pissarro, in his seventies, had a recurring eye infection that made working outdoors in wind and dust painful, so he took to painting Paris from rented windows. In 1901, and again in 1902, he leased rooms on the Place Dauphine at the downstream tip of the Ile de la Cite, looking straight out at the Pont-Neuf, the oldest standing bridge in the city. He worked the view as a series through the winter, this one caught in mist, the bridge and its traffic softened to grey shapes and the far bank barely there. He kept up these Paris series almost to the end. He died the next year, in 1903.