The Tuileries Gardens, Summer

The Tuileries Gardens, Summer at the Kreeger Museum in Washington, DC, painted in 1900, belongs to Pissarro's series of Tuileries views painted from the elevated perspective of the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli. The Kreeger Museum, a private institution housed in the 1963 Philip Johnson house built for David and Carmen Kreeger in Washington's upper northwest, holds an intimate collection of Impressionist and twentieth-century works that includes significant Pissarro paintings. The Tuileries Garden in summer — its formal parterres shaded by plane trees in full leaf, its allées animated by the Parisian public taking the air — offered a very different chromatic subject from the same garden in winter. The summer palette of deep greens, warm shadows, and bright-lit paths required him to find variety within the predominantly green register that all foliage painting presents, and the formal geometry of the Tuileries allées — so visible in winter — was now hidden beneath the canopy, replaced by the play of dappled light and shade.

The elevated viewpoint for the Tuileries series—taken from a hotel window or elevated position—gave Pissarro a bird's-eye perspective that compressed the garden's spatial depth and emphasised the patterns made by paths, tree canopies, and the movement of figures below. His divisionist technique rendered the summer canopy as a dense mosaic of green tones.