L'insenatura dei piloti a Le Havre. Alta marea. Pomeriggio. Sole

This was among the last things Camille Pissarro ever painted. In the summer of 1903, short of money and 73 years old, he took a commission to paint the busy outer harbor of Le Havre and worked at it from a hotel window between July and September. The oldest of the Impressionists, he had spent decades painting quiet fields and village roads, and here at the end he turned to a loud, modernizing port full of steamers, cranes and shifting tides. This canvas catches the cove at high tide on a sunny afternoon. He fell ill soon after returning to Paris and died that November. The city of Le Havre bought several of these harbor views almost at once, and they have stayed in the town where he made them.