Camille Pissarro - L’Île Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog) [1888]

Camille Pissarro - L’Île Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog) [1888], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Pissarro created the present painting from an earlier composition in his studio rather than in front of the motif, which was his usual practice. He had visited Rouen in 1883 and made several drawings and etchings of the Seine that he consulted five years later when painting this foggy view of factories and barges on the river. An industrial landscape dominated by a smoke-belching chimney, the scene is rendered with great beauty in a subtle range of colours. The broad, flat frame with its laurel-leaf border was designed by Pissarro for this picture, though it may originally have been painted white.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art, oil on canvas, 46.7 x 55.9 cm]