The Quai Malaquais and the Institute (de France), Spring, Sunlight (Fourth Series)

Pissarro spent his last years painting cities through glass. A chronic eye infection made working outdoors risky, so he rented rooms with a view and set up indoors, and in 1903 the room was in a hotel on the quai Voltaire in Paris, looking across the Seine at the quai Malaquais and the dome of the Institut de France. He was 72. He began the canvas in the spring and is thought to have finished it that autumn, and it was still in his studio when he died in November. His son Ludovic-Rodo kept it, and later it went to Otto Krebs, a German industrialist who collected French painting at his estate near Weimar. Krebs died in 1941. In 1945 a Soviet trophy brigade found his pictures hidden in a safe at the estate, and they were taken to Leningrad. The Hermitage showed them for the first time in 1995.