Pont de la Clef in Bruges, Belgium

Pont de la Clef in Bruges of 1894 at the Manchester Art Gallery was painted during Pissarro's brief exile from France following the anarchist bombings and the subsequent repression that made staying in Paris uncomfortable for someone with his political associations. He had been in contact with anarchist writers and editors — including Jean Grave, whose journal La Révolte he supported — and in the atmosphere of panic and repression following the assassination of President Carnot in June 1894, he felt unsafe remaining in France. His Bruges canvases therefore carry a biographical charge beyond their pictorial interest: they were made in exile, in a city not his own, under political pressure. The canal-side architecture of Bruges — medieval, northern, water-defined — offered him a subject quite different from his Norman landscapes, and the Fleming town's grey northern light and reflective waterways produced a palette that was more restrained and cool than his French subjects. Manchester Art Gallery, which holds one of England's most important collections outside London, acquired this Bruges canvas as part of its distinguished French nineteenth-century holdings.

The bridge and canal are handled with Pissarro's mature technique — short, varied strokes in a range of greens, blues, and warm greys that capture the specific quality of a cloudy northern light on water and stone. The reflections in the canal are treated with slightly looser, more blurred marks than the solid architecture above, distinguishing surface from reflection without resorting to a different technique.