The Tuileries Gardens, Bright Cloudy Weather

At the end of 1898 Camille Pissarro, then 68, wrote that he had taken an apartment at 204 rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries, with a superb view of the garden. From its windows he painted that garden again and again through 1899 and 1900, in different seasons and weather, and this canvas is one of the 1900 views, made in the year Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle.

The eye runs from above down the sandy walks and the lawns toward the Seine. On the right edge of the skyline stand the two spires of the church of Sainte-Clotilde, and his signature and the date sit in the lower right corner.

The picture's later life was far less public. It ended up in Germany, was taken to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and stayed out of sight in the Hermitage stores for five decades. It was first shown in 1995, in the exhibition Hidden Treasures Revealed.