Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

In his 1963 monograph on Pissarro, John Rewald discusses the present painting as follows:

Whereas his recent views of the Avenue de l'Opéra had been mostly "silvery" (to use his own word), this narrow street provided Pissarro with an opportunity to ally vivid colors with the many-faceted planes of his architectural motif: red and blue roofs, white, brownish, and yellowish walls, dark stone façades, bright awnings, and even a cluster of multicolored posters. Here and there are a few small figures whose silhouettes help define the empty space of the foreground. With astonishing mastery he had managed to treat, through accords and oppositions of colors, a subject that is primarily composed of lines and cubes. Without neglecting any feature, he had nevertheless completely integrated every last gable, window, lantern, and chimney into a composition ample and strong enough to assert itself above its multiple components. While Monet frequently used an over-all effect of softening light to obtain the unity of his pictures, Pissarro achieved this unity without sacrificing any details to the enveloping atmosphere. (J. Rewald, op. cit., 1963, p. 152)

This particular view of La rue de l'épicerie, dominated by the Rouen Cathedral, first appeared in Pissarro's oeuvre as a watercolor in 1883, nine years before Monet embarked on his well-known series of the same subject. In 1886 Pissarro made an etching of this street scene, and in 1898 he depicted it in a series of three paintings, including this one, which vary slightly in perspective and in the number of passerby visible. La rue de l'épicerie à Rouen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Pissarro and Venturi, no. 1036) is the same size as this work and shows a closer view of the cathedral with a larger crowd in the foreground.