Winter

In June 1871 Pissarro came back from London, where he had waited out the Franco-Prussian War, and found that Prussian soldiers had been quartered in his house at Louveciennes, west of Paris, and that much of the work he had left behind was lost. Soon afterwards Achille Arosa, a wealthy Paris collector, commissioned four paintings of the seasons to hang above doors. That is why this canvas is so long and low, more than twice as wide as it is tall. Winter came first, painted at Louveciennes, probably early in 1872. The other three were finished after Pissarro moved to Pontoise. Specialists single this one out as the boldest of the set, a snowbound village built from the flat geometry of walls and roofs. When Arosa's collection was auctioned in Paris in 1891, the four canvases were bought together, and they have changed hands as a set ever since.