CAMILLE PISSARRO | Le Pont-Royal, après-midi, temps couvert, 4e série

Berheim-Jeune, Paris
Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above on November 29, 1917)
Duval-Fleury, Paris (acquired from the above on March 25, 1918)
Philippe Bemberg, Lausanne & Paris (acquired circa 1964)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Copenhague, Charlottenborg, Fransk Malerkunst, 1918
Lausanne, Palais de Beaulieu, Chefs d'oeuvres des collections suisses: de Manet à Picasso, 1964
Paris, Hôtel de ville, Paris sous le ciel de la peinture, 2000, illustrated in the catalogue p. 113

Ludovic Rodo Pissarro et Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, son art, son oeuvre, Paris, 1939, no. 1249, illustrated pl. 251
John Rewald, C. Pissarro, Paris, 1974, illustrated no. 48 (incorrectly catalogued)
Joachim Pissarro, Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro, Catalogue critique des peintures, vol. III, Milan, 2005, no. 1487, illustrated p. 900

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In 1893, Camille Pissarro began painting almost exclusively urban sites, abandoning the country landscapes that had formed the essential part of his oeuvre. The last decade of his life was devoted to painting the cities of Rouen, Le Havre, Dieppe and Paris.

The series of Parisian views began with the Saint-Lazare train station depicted from a room in the Hotel Restaurant Garnier. In 1897, Pissarro moved to the Hôtel de Russie where he painted his famous views of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens. The following year, he painted a series of views of the Avenue de L'Opéra from the Hôtel du Louvre. He then rented an apartment at 204 rue de Rivoli and began his paintings of the Tuileries Gardens. In 1900, he chose another apartment on 28 Place Dauphine where he depicted the Square du Vert Galan and the Pont Neuf. In March 1903, he began another series, to which the present painting belongs, from a room in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire. The view is presented looking towards the left and seven other canvases were painted from a similar viewpoint. However, unlike Monet, Pissarro did not study the atmospheric variations of the same repeated subject but in different subjects and from different viewpoints.

In Le Pont Royal, après-midi temps couvert 4ème série, the sky and water play an important role. The painter, at the peak of his mastery of the impressionist technique, captures the different light effects and the complex atmosphere of a cloudy Parisian afternoon. He focuses on the details of urban life, portraying the Morris columns, carriages and passersby on the Quai Voltaire and the Pont Royal with precise brushstrokes. The perspective offered by the elevated hotel room plays a crucial role, as in all the series of Parians scenes, the lines of the quays are intersected by the bridges and takes up again by the trees of the Tuileries Gardens.

Le Pont Royal, après-midi temps couvert, 4ème série, is a moving testimony from the last of the Parisian series in which Pissarro had found new inspiration and definitively cemented his reputation as one of the great masters of Impressionism. The artist would die in November 1903 a few months after having finished this painting and the Quai Voltaire series.