Route de Versailles Louveciennes, Winter Sun and Snow by Camille Pissarro was created in 1870. The painting is in Thyssen Bornemisza Museum Madrid. The size of the work 46 x 55,3 cm and is made of oil on canvas.
Camille Pissarro painted twenty-two canvas of the effects of light, seasonal weather, and movement on Route de Versailles in Louveciennes between the autumn of 1869 and the summer of 1872. He and his family had leased part of a substantial 18th-century house on that street. One friend and colleague, Claude Monet, who lived in the nearby town of Bougival for much of that same period, seems to have spent several days with the Pissarros and painted with him on the Route de Versailles in the snowy winter of 1869-1870. Both men were to move from suburban Paris to the environs of London in 1870 to escape the rigours of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune in France. Pissarro returned to his house, to find it ransacked by the German troops during the period of the siege of Paris.
Surely the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza’s wonderfully wintery view of the Route de Versailles was made in the winter of 1869-1870 and is, hence, one of the earliest works in the series of twenty-two canvases. It relates directly to a smaller canvas made at precisely the same point in the road and framing an identical view. This canvas (La Route de Versailles (effet de neige), PV 72) was surely made as a small-scale study for the Thyssen canvas and was dated on completion, 1870, therefore forcing us to date the undated Thyssen canvas to 1870. The reasons for this are obvious. To achieve a “plein-air” quality in the snow, one has to endure very cold… Read more in Thyssen Bornemisza Museum Madrid
