Praça do Théâtre-Français e Avenida da Ópera, sol, manhã de inverno

By 1898 Pissarro was nearly 70 and his eyes had begun to fail. A recurring infection made it painful to work outdoors in wind and dust, so he did something he had resisted for most of his life as a painter of open fields. He took rooms high up in Paris hotels and painted the city through the glass. From the Grand Hotel du Louvre he had the Avenue de l'Opera running away beneath him, one of the broad straight streets Baron Haussmann had cut through the old medieval tangle a generation earlier. He worked the same view over and over in different weather. This is the winter-morning version, low sun catching the wet pavement and the small dark crowd, the carriages and passers-by dissolved into flecks of paint.