The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon

The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon is an 1899 oil on canvas by Camille Pissarro, one of two canvases of this title and year in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession 66.36).

In his later years a recurring eye infection kept Pissarro from working outdoors except in warm weather, so he painted many city views from the windows of rooms on upper floors. This canvas belongs to a series of eight cityscapes he produced between 1898 and 1900. This view was probably painted from his apartment at 204 Rue de Rivoli, which looked across the public garden laid out where the Tuileries Palace had stood before its destruction. The Met holds a second winter-afternoon canvas from the same year, a different composition, alongside a spring-morning view of the garden.

Pissarro looks down on bare trees, gravel walks and a scattering of small figures under a cloudy late-afternoon sky. On the horizon he picks out two Paris landmarks: the twin steeples of the church of Sainte-Clotilde and the Dôme des Invalides. The canvas measures 73.7 by 92.1 cm and is signed and dated at lower left.

The picture has an unusual early history. Alfred Sisley died in January 1899, and that May Pissarro gave this canvas to a sale held at the Galerie Georges Petit for the benefit of Sisley's children. It then passed through a number of private collections before Katrin S. Vietor presented it to the Met in 1966 in memory of Ernest G. Vietor.