Pont de la Clef in Bruges, Belgium

Pissarro visited Belgium in 1894, fleeing France during the wave of anarchist repression that followed the assassination of President Carnot, and his painting of the Pont de la Clef in Bruges belongs to this brief exile period. The Bruges canvases represent an unusual departure from his habitual French subjects — Normandy, Pontoise, Paris — and document the visual impact of Flemish townscapes on an artist whose default subject was the French countryside. The canal-side architecture of Bruges, with its reflective water and compact medieval buildings, offered him a different kind of urban landscape from his Paris series.

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.