Route de Versailles, Louveciennes

Pissarro lived on this road. His house at Louveciennes, a village west of Paris on the way to Versailles, was taken over by Prussian troops in the autumn of 1870 while he and his family sat out the war in London. He came back in June 1871 to find the place ransacked and the work of some 20 years gone with it, something like 1,500 pictures, most of them damaged or destroyed. He painted this in 1872, his last year in the village before he moved on to Pontoise. The road, the low houses and the figures walking up it were subjects he had already painted several times before the war. One of those earlier versions, with winter sun lying on snow, hangs in Madrid at the Thyssen-Bornemisza.