MURA · THE COLLECTION · CAMILLE PISSARRO

Snow at Louveciennes

Snow at Louveciennes is a small oil painting on panel by Camille Pissarro, made around 1870 in the village west of Paris where he then lived. It shows trees and houses under heavy snow, with a single figure walking below the trees, and measures 32.3 by 47.5 cm. It belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Camille Pissarro · c. 1870 · Oil on panel · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The museum describes trees and houses blanketed by heavy snow at Louveciennes, painted in a limited palette of white, brown, blue, tan, grey and green to evoke grey skies and freshly fallen snow on a cold winter day. Only the footsteps of a solitary figure, walking beneath the screen of trees, break the silence. Louveciennes is a commune in the Yvelines, between Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye and next to Marly-le-Roi; more than 120 paintings by Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Monet depict it.

How it was painted

Pissarro was born in 1830 on Saint Thomas in the Danish West Indies and settled in Paris in 1855, where he sought and received instruction from Corot. He and his family lived outside Paris, at Pontoise and later at Louveciennes, and both places gave him subjects of village life, rivers, woods and people at work. The museum says this panel has the freshness and spontaneity of a picture painted outdoors. Its date sits at the edge of a rupture: when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Pissarro, holding only Danish nationality and unable to join the army, moved his family to Norwood on the edge of London, and married Julie Vellay in Croydon in 1871. After his return he lived at Pontoise from 1872 to 1884 and then at Éragny until his death in Paris in 1903.

Where it went

The panel was in a private collection in Paris and by December 1972 belonged to Sarec S.A. in Switzerland, which sold it that month to Paul Rosenberg and Company in New York. The Art Institute bought it from Rosenberg in 1973 with the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Endowment. It has been lent to Impressionists in Winter: Effets de Neige at the Phillips Collection in Washington in 1998–99, which travelled to San Francisco and Brooklyn, and to Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape in Baltimore, Milwaukee and Memphis in 2007–08. It is listed in the critical catalogue of Pissarro's paintings by Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts. The museum lists no current gallery for it.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Coast and Countryside collection with a wintry mood: a village lane softened by snow.