The East Breakwater, Return of The Regatta, Le Havre

The East Breakwater, Return of the Regatta, Le Havre of 1903 at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena was painted during what proved to be Pissarro's final working campaign. He arrived in Le Havre in July 1903 specifically to paint the harbour, following the pattern of his urban series campaigns at Rouen and Paris — checking into a hotel with views over the subject and painting systematically across weather conditions and times of day. The connection to Impressionism's origins was explicit: Monet's Impression, Sunrise of 1872, which named the movement, had been painted at Le Havre's harbour, and Pissarro's final campaign at the same location closes a circle with his own beginnings at the moment when the Impressionists were first defining their collective programme. He died in Paris in November 1903, four months after leaving Le Havre, and the harbour paintings from that summer were among his last finished works. The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, which holds one of the finest private art collections in the United States, acquired this final Le Havre canvas as a significant example of Pissarro's late period and a historically resonant late work.

The harbour composition balances the solid stone breakwater against the animated water surface full of returning boats and figures. Pissarro's late marine handling uses varied directional strokes to build the reflective harbour surface, contrasting with firmer strokes in the stone pier and the sail and mast elements of the returning regatta.