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©
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Camille Pissarro

Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Winter Sun and Snow

ca. 1870
Oil on canvas.
46 x 55.3 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.1993.8
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop

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 conditions while painting. For this reason, Pissarro chose a vantage point almost precisely in the front of his house, so that he could go in and out easily during the process of painting. He also elected to render his sensations of this fleeting quality of light and weather on a canvas of comparatively small dimension that could serve as the model for a larger painting which was mostly like executed almost entirely in the warmth of the studio. Hence, the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza painting, for all its freshness, was probably painted indoors with the smaller and more direct work as the model.

Pissarro painted five snowy landscapes on the Route de Versailles during the winter of 1869-1870. In all probability the storm occurred in January of 1870, when Monet was staying with the Pissarros and when the younger artist painted three views of the same street. Hence, there are eight winter landscapes of the Route de Versailles produced by Monet and Pissarro early in 1870, of which the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza's is a principal masterpiece. The two largest paintings in the sequence are Monet's Route de Versailles, effet de neige (W 147) in a private collection in Chicago and Pissarro's La route par la neige, Louveciennes (PV 142) in a private collection. These are followed by three canvases by Pissarro of identical dimension, of which the Thyssen's is the most fully developed, perhaps largely because it is based on a painted study. Interestingly, Monet may have created a painting of the same street on the same days, but from a vantage point on the other side of the road. This canvas Route, effet d'hiver, soleil couchant, is also of almost identical dimension as the Pissarro and is today in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen.

This small group of paintings by Pissarro and Monet occupy equivalent positions in the history of Impressionism as the better known sequence of paintings made by Renoir and Monet in the summer of 1869 at la Grenouillere in Bougival. The summer sequence was difficult because of the quantity of figures and boats on the water and the resulting "mobility" of the landscape motif, while the winter sequence posed problems of temperature and, of course, of the real difficulties of painting snow, which is at once reflective and less material than the paint that describes it. Monet had already attempted winter landscapes earlier in the 1860s and was, hence, more adept at this kind of painting. Pissarro had shown less interest in effects of light and atmosphere than in questions of pictorial construction and composition. It is, in fact, likely that the impetus of Monet effectively challenged Pissarro to a kind of pictorial duel of complex plein-air transcription. Indeed, he seems to have inaugurated the series of twenty-two canvases at Monet's prompting.

Richard R. Brettell
 

19th Century19th Century - French paintingPaintingOilcanvas
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Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Winter Sun and Snow. Camino de Versalles, Louveciennes, sol de invierno y nieve, 1870
Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Winter Sun and Snow
Camille Pissarro

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Carmen Thyssen Collection

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Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Winter Sun and Snow. Camino de Versalles, Louveciennes, sol de invierno y nieve, 1870
Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Winter Sun and Snow
Camille Pissarro

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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