Bath Road, London, (sketch)

This 1897 sketch, held at the Ashmolean Museum, was made during one of Pissarro's visits to London — a city he knew from his wartime exile of 1870–71 and returned to periodically. Bath Road offered a quintessentially English suburban subject, far from the Seine landscapes that dominated his work. The sketch quality suggests it was a working study rather than a finished exhibition piece, capturing fleeting effects rapidly before developing them into larger compositions. Pissarro was among the first French Impressionists to paint London's particular grey-green light, a practice that influenced his friend Monet, who later developed the Thames series in part inspired by Pissarro's earlier London work.

As a sketch, the work shows Pissarro's rapid method: loose, gestural strokes establish spatial relationships and tonal contrasts without refined detail. The grey English light is suggested through a muted palette of cool green, grey, and pale ochre, with architecture indicated in broad blocked passages.