Pissarro, Camille (1830-1903)
Les toits du Vieux Rouen, temps gris (The Roofs of Old Rouen, Gray Weather)
1896
Oil on canvas, 72.3 × 91.4 cm
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo
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.” (TMA)