The Road to Versailles, Louveciennes, Snow

In the winter of 1869 Pissarro was renting part of an old house on the route de Versailles at Louveciennes, west of Paris, and the road outside his door became the subject. Between the autumn of 1869 and the summer of 1872 he painted that one stretch 22 times, in sun, in rain and under snow.

This is a snow version, from around 1870. In September that year the Prussian army moved up the Seine valley and Pissarro left with his family for Brittany and then London, leaving behind the house and roughly 1,500 canvases, the work of 20 years. Soldiers were quartered there over the winter. When he returned in June 1871 about 40 of those paintings were still intact. The others had been used as floor mats and to wipe boots clean of mud.

The canvas is small, 43.5 by 65.5 centimetres, signed C. Pissarro in the lower right, and it is one of the road views that came through.