Castaños en Louveciennes

This quiet stand of bare chestnuts once hung in a house at Auvers-sur-Oise that belonged to Dr. Paul Gachet, a physician who collected the Impressionists and dabbled at painting himself. Pissarro was his friend. Gachet kept the canvas for decades, and 11 years after it was made, in 1890, the same doctor would take in a far more troubled patient for the final weeks of his life, Vincent van Gogh. Pissarro shows Louveciennes, west of Paris, under the flat light of winter, the trees stripped back to bare branches. He was the steady elder of the Impressionists, the one who kept exhibiting when the others lost heart, building a scene like this from small, patient touches. Gachet's children gave the painting to France in 1954.