Le Jardin des Tuileries et le pavillon de Flore, effet de neige is the first of fourteen canvases depicting views of the Louvre and its associated gardens that Camille Pissarro painted during a six-month period from January to June of 1899. Pissarro’s series paintings of Paris in the late 1890s and early 1900s are among the supreme achievements of Impressionism, taking their place alongside Claude Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral, poplars and grainstacks and the later waterlilies (see fig. 1). For an artist who throughout his earlier career was primarily celebrated as a painter of rural life rather than the urban environment, Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, Gare Saint-Lazare and Jardin des Tuileries canvases confirmed his position as the preeminent painter of the City (see fig. 2).

The enigma of Paris takes its shape through motif, light, color and paint handling in different guises for each of the Impressionist artists. For Pissarro “the Louvre becomes Paris, its towers, façades and courtyard literally filling the picture,” Rick Brettell writes. “The… painter’s pictorial fascination with the Louvre might be interpreted as a realization of the lasting importance of great art. Indeed we must remember that Pissarro studiously omitted the most conspicuous monument of modern Paris—the Eiffel Tower—from his city, and that he also avoided her second greatest symbol, Notre-Dame de Paris. For Pissarro, the Louvre, in rain and snow, at dawn, in autumn and winter, became the center of what might be called his ‘series’ of series” (Exh. Cat. Dallas Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Royal Academy of Arts, The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings, London, 1993, p. xxxv).

In the winter of 1898, Pissarro decided to rent an apartment in Paris rather than taking hotel rooms as he had done during his previous visits to the capital. Pissarro now made his stay in Paris more permanent so that he could devote his time to studying and painting the incomparable cityscape. From his letter to his son Lucien dated December 4, 1898, we can sense the excitement Pissarro must have felt as he describes the view from his window: "We have engaged an apartment at 204 rue de Rivoli, facing the Tuileries, with a superb view of the Garden, the Louvre to the left, in the background the houses on the quais behind the trees, to the right the Dôme des Invalides, the steeples of Ste. Clothilde behind the solid mass of chestnut trees. It is very beautiful. I shall paint a fine series" (Camille Pissarro quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, Pissarro, 1980, p. 146). When he returned to Paris in late 1899 he again rented the same apartment, allowing him, after a year away, to once again work within the motif of the Tuileries Gardens.

Being settled in an apartment, rather than frequently moving between short-term accommodations, allowed Pissarro to spend more time working on a particular series of paintings, and to meditate and experiment with the subject matter. This resulted in a great variation within the series, as the artist was able to observe and depict his subject in different weather conditions, and in different seasons and times of day. Moving from one window to the next, he studied the dynamic urban landscape from three slightly different vantage points, all portrayed in his series of the Tuileries: a frontal view, showing the Bassins des Tuileries, a view of the Louvre's Pavillon de Flore and the southern Denon wing in the background and, moving eastwards, a view of the Pavillon de Marsan to the left, with Jardin du Carrousel in the center and the Denon wing in the distance.

Le Jardin des Tuileries, effet de neige is one of fourteen canvases that Pissarro painted on this particular campaign (Pissarro and Snollearts 1251-1264); it is singled out as the only composition from this series to include snow; the following year Pissarro would return to the same apartment and create an additional three canvases with snow effects. In Katherine Rothkopf’s essay on Pissarro’s winter scenes she highlights the rarity of snow in the Tuileries garden views: “Pissarro produced twenty-eight paintings in his Tuileries series, fourteen in 1899 and fourteen in 1900…. He produced four works that include winter precipitation, three paintings with snow, and one with frost. His snowscapes from this series feature views of the Tuileries with the Louvre beyond, providing a new contract between the nature of the gardens and the architecture of the buildings” (Katherine Rothkopf, “Camille Pissarro: A Dedicated Painter of Winter,” Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Impressionists in Winter. Effets de Neige, 1998-99; see figs 3-6). The artist’s masterful handling of his medium in Le Jardin des Tuileries et le pavillon de Flore, effet de neige is reflected in each nuanced brush stroke. The snow reflects the light of the sky where pinks and purples suggest the late dawn or early evening of Parisian winter. Atop the Pavillon de Flore, which sits at the end of the Denon wing of the Louvre, flies the French tricolor; in the distance across the River Seine is the left bank and the building that line the Quai d’Orsay.

The present work has a distinguished provenance history. Acquired by Galerie Durand-Ruel the year it was painted, as part of the artist’s entire Parisian series, it remained with the Durand-Ruel family for over a century until it was acquired nearly fifteen years ago by the present owner.