View of Bazincourt, February, Sunrise

This is a February morning in 1893, seen from an upstairs window in Éragny, the village on the river Epte north-west of Paris where Pissarro had settled with his family nine years earlier. Across the bare fields stands the neighbouring hamlet of Bazincourt, its church tower catching the first low sun. Winter gave him what he liked: the ground stripped to a few trees and a sky doing most of the work. The colours are colder and more broken than they seem from across a room, small touches of pink and pale gold set beside blue shadow to carry the chill of dawn. One thing here most visitors miss. Pissarro would not varnish his paintings, since varnish yellows and would have deadened these dry, almost chalky surfaces. A later owner had this canvas varnished anyway, and the museum's restorers stripped that coating away, returning it to the matte finish he intended.