Entrance to the Village of Voisins

Where Voisins is

Voisins is a hamlet of Louveciennes, a village about half an hour west of Paris by train, and the road in the painting runs toward the Château de Voisins. The Musée d'Orsay's own record does not name the site; the identification comes from French sources on the picture rather than from the museum.

Pissarro was living at Louveciennes from June 1871 to April 1872, in the months between his return from England and the family's move to Pontoise. The village had been his subject before the war, and this is one of the last pictures he made there.

What he had come back to

The Pissarros had left Louveciennes in September 1870, when the Prussians invaded and commandeered the house, and spent the war in south London. When they came home in 1871 the house was destroyed and almost all of the work stored in it was gone. Kunstmuseum Basel's chronology of his life says about forty paintings survived, rescued by a neighbour, and gives no figure for what did not.

Most of what Pissarro had painted in France before 1870 no longer exists. The subjects he had been working on for a decade survive mainly in what he painted after he came back to them.

Durand-Ruel, Ernest May, and a frame built for three

The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had the painting by 1874 and reproduced it that year as a print, in the thirteenth instalment of his Recueil d'estampes, as number 121. It then belonged to the collector Ernest May, who put it in his sale at the Galerie Georges Petit on 4 June 1890 as lot 57. It failed to sell and he kept it.

May gave it to the French state in 1923 under a donation with reserved usufruct, an arrangement that let him keep the picture for his lifetime, and it reached the Louvre in 1926. The Musée d'Orsay still records its frame as one panel of a triptych, 66.5 centimetres high and 215.5 centimetres wide across all three, so the painting was hung as part of a set of three.

It went to the Jeu de Paume in 1947 and was assigned to the Musée d'Orsay when that museum opened in 1986.

Where it has been shown, and what to call it

The picture had a public life early. It hung at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 as number 542, at the retrospective survey of French art at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 as number 516, and in the Pissarro memorial exhibition at Durand-Ruel in 1904. It was in the Louvre's Chefs-d'œuvre de la peinture in 1945, at the Israel Museum in 1994 and 1995, and in Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery in London in 2015 as number 69.

The Musée d'Orsay records no showing at the Salon and none at any of the eight Impressionist exhibitions. The museum catalogues the painting in French only, even on its English pages. Entrance to the Village of Voisins is the usual English rendering, not the museum's own wording.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Pissarro builds this village approach from vertical trees and a road that slips between them. In detail, the scene balances the order of an avenue with the irregular signs of weather, use, and rural life.