Entrada da aldeia de Voisins

Pissarro painted this village road in 1872, not long after coming home from a hard couple of years. During the Franco-Prussian War he had fled to London, and Prussian soldiers had taken over his house at Louveciennes and used hundreds of his canvases as duckboards and aprons, so he lost most of a decade's work. Voisins was a hamlet just beside Louveciennes, and here he simply painted what stood in front of him, a plain lane of bare trees, low houses, a figure and a cart going about an ordinary morning. The flickering, broken brushwork was still new enough to unsettle people. Two years later he would hang pictures like this at the first Impressionist exhibition, where critics complained they looked unfinished.