L'église Saint-Jacques à Dieppe

Pissarro was 71 and a chronic eye complaint made long spells outdoors difficult, so he rented rooms with a view and painted through the window. In the summer of 1901 he took one at the Hotel du Commerce in Dieppe, on the Normandy coast, directly opposite the north door of the church of Saint-Jacques, and between late July and the end of September he made nine canvases from it, the church and the market square in front of it at different hours. This one has a longer history than the others. A Paris dealer sold it to a buyer in Berlin in October 1941 for 150,000 francs, and in September 1942 it left France without lawful export. It turned up after the war at the collecting point in Munich where recovered pictures were gathered, and came back to France in 1950 with no owner established. It is catalogued as MNR 222, one of the recovered works the French state holds while the search for their owners goes on, and since 2003 it has hung in the castle museum at Dieppe, a few minutes' walk from the window it was painted at.