Louvre

Louvre at the Museum of Fine Arts of Reims, painted in 1902, is one of several views of the Louvre's riverfront that Pissarro produced during his late Paris campaigns, approaching the great museum from across the Seine with the systematic investigation of an artist who had spent his career challenging the institution that building represented. The Museum of Fine Arts of Reims, which holds an important collection of French art within one of France's great Gothic cathedral cities, holds this late Paris view as part of its French nineteenth-century holdings. The Louvre — the world's most visited museum, the repository of the tradition that the Impressionists had challenged — appears in these final paintings not as an antagonist but as a beautiful urban fact, its long facade across the water treated with the same interested observation Pissarro brought to any building or landscape. The irony of the old anarchist and Impressionist revolutionary devoting some of his final works to the most institutionally loaded building in France was not lost on contemporaries who understood his career.

The Louvre's stone facade is rendered in warm ochres and pale beiges, its architectural detail barely legible through broken-color brushwork. Pissarro was more interested in the building's tonal mass under particular light conditions than in its architectural specifics, subordinating the famous palace to his chromatic analysis of Parisian atmosphere.