The Pont-Neuf, Rainy Afternoon (First Series)

By 1901 Pissarro was in his seventies and troubled by a chronic infection of the eye that his doctors said should keep him away from dust, wind and glare. So he painted Paris from behind glass. Late in 1900 he had taken rooms on the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine, looking straight down onto the Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge in the city. From that one window he worked the same view over and over through the seasons, in sun, in snow, and here in the grey wet of a rainy afternoon, figures and carriages crossing under their umbrellas. It was one of about a dozen he made of this bridge alone.