Le Louvre et le pont du Carrousel, soleil

Le Louvre et le pont du Carrousel, soleil at the Matsuoka Museum of Art in Tokyo, painted in 1903, shows the view from the Quai des Tuileries looking east toward the Louvre and the Carrousel bridge in sunshine — one of Pissarro's final series in his last year of life. The Matsuoka Museum holds several late Pissarro works that document his final Paris campaign alongside the Ashmolean and other collections. The Louvre's long riverfront facade, seen from across the Seine, provided the most architecturally magnificent subject in his entire urban series: centuries of royal and imperial building, the accumulated cultural authority of the French state, translated by his Impressionist technique into a living presence in the sunlit Parisian afternoon. The sunlight specified in the title transformed the grey stone of the Louvre's facade into warm golden-ochre tones that gave this most formal of architectural subjects the same sensuous warmth he brought to his Norman orchards and garden subjects.

Warm sunlight is rendered through a palette of golden ochre, warm white, and pale blue sky. Pissarro's Divisionist strokes are more open in sunlit conditions, with greater contrast between warm and cool passages. The river surface mirrors the bridge and facades in shimmering horizontal strokes.