Strada per Versailles, Rocquencourt

Pissarro spent the winter of 1870 in London, a refugee from the war between France and Prussia. He had left his house at Louveciennes behind, and the Prussian soldiers quartered there used his stored canvases as floor rags and aprons, so that years of his early work were gone by the time he returned in 1871. This quiet road at nearby Rocquencourt is one of the first pictures he painted once he was home. He tilts it uphill until it seems to run on without end, then lays the long blue shadows of the roadside trees straight across it, which makes the road read as wider still. Up close the surface is loose flecks of many colours, put down to catch the plain daylight resting on the road.