Fox Hill, Upper Norwood

In the autumn of 1870 Prussian troops were closing on Paris, and Pissarro fled with his family to London. Soldiers moved into his house at Louveciennes and used many of his stored canvases as mats and aprons, destroying years of work. In London he settled south of the river, in the then-village of Upper Norwood, and this snowy hillside is thought to be one of the first pictures he painted there. It stays close to the country roads he had been working on outside Paris, as if he had carried the subject across the Channel with him. Only about a dozen of his London canvases from that winter are known to survive.