"The subject is of the utmost simplicity: some ordinary houses on a suburban street, the very street on which the artist had been living in Pontoise since 1872. The pale, clouded sky casts a bluish veil over the entire landscape, so that bluish tints appear not only on the slate-covered roofs, but also on the white walls of the buildings, on the sunlit stretch of road, in the shadows, and even in the foliage of the trees at left. This, therefore, is an excellent example for the basic tenet of the Impressionists, that what mattered in a motif was not the 'color of reality'... but the 'color of appearance'... the coloration resulting from reflections and atmospheric conditions, as the artist perceives it at a given moment." (J. Rewald, op. cit., p. 98)