The Roofs of Old Rouen, Gray Weather
Artist: Camille Pissarro (French, 1830-1903)
Date: 1896
Dimensions:
Painting: 28 7/16 × 36 in. (72.3 × 91.4 cm)
Frame: 40 × 47 × 4 in. (101.6 × 119.4 × 10.2 cm)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Object number: 1951.361
Label Text:Camille Pissarro was suffering from a chronic eye infection that kept him indoors when he painted this view of the northern French city of Rouen through a window of his hotel (he died blind). As he wrote to his son Lucien, also an artist, in February of 1896, “I have found a really exceptional motif in a room of the hotel facing north . . . Just imagine: the whole of old Rouen seen above the roofs, with the Cathedral…and the fantastic roofs, really amazing turrets. Can you picture a . . . canvas filled with ancient, gray, worm-eaten roofs? It’s extraordinary!”
Pissarro’s “completely gray picture,” as he described it, is punctuated with terracotta-colored roof tiles and chimneys and a grass-green section of the cathedral’s weathered copper roof. He convincingly conveys the heavy atmosphere of an overcast winter day, achieving his stated desire “to follow the fugitive and admirable effects of nature.”
Look for two earlier paintings by Pissarro in Gallery 33, each from different phases of his long career.
Pissarro’s “completely gray picture,” as he described it, is punctuated with terracotta-colored roof tiles and chimneys and a grass-green section of the cathedral’s weathered copper roof. He convincingly conveys the heavy atmosphere of an overcast winter day, achieving his stated desire “to follow the fugitive and admirable effects of nature.”
Look for two earlier paintings by Pissarro in Gallery 33, each from different phases of his long career.
Not on view
In Collection(s)