Pont Boieldieu in Rouen, Rainy Weather

A wide stone bridge spans the Seine in Rouen under a grey, drizzling sky, with the industrial quays and chimneys of the city rising beyond it. Painted in 1896, this is one of the celebrated series in which Camille Pissarro, working at an advanced age and troubled by failing eyesight, turned to Rouen’s modern waterfront as a subject worthy of a landscape painter. Renting a room overlooking the bridge, he rendered the same motif at different hours and in different weather, capturing the play of steam, mist and rain-light over iron and water, and opening the genre of urban industry to Impressionist painting.