The Village of Knokke

In June 1894 an anarchist stabbed Sadi Carnot, the president of France, and the country answered with a hard crackdown on anyone tied to anarchist circles. Pissarro, then in his sixties, had drawn for anarchist papers and kept friends in the movement, and that summer he judged it wiser to be out of France. He crossed into Belgium and settled for a few months at Knokke, a small resort on the North Sea. This is the view he found there: a gentle slope down onto white houses and red roofs, with a church spire half lost among the trees. He worked at Knokke from July into September, then carried the canvas back to the France he had briefly slipped away from.