Morning, An Overcast Day, Rouen

Morning, An Overcast Day, Rouen (Matin, temps gris, Rouen) is an oil on canvas painted in 1896 by the French Impressionist Camille Pissarro, signed and dated 'C. Pissarro. 96' at lower right; it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession 1980.21.1).

Pissarro spent two working stays in Rouen in 1896, in the spring and the autumn. He wrote of his wish to paint the iron bridge on a rainy day, with much traffic, carriages, pedestrians, workers on the quays, boats, smoke and mist in the distance, the whole scene full of animation and life. This canvas is one of several views of the Boieldieu Bridge, also called the Grand Pont, that he painted from a room in the Hôtel d'Angleterre; he had already painted the bridge under other weather conditions earlier in the year. The French title is thought to be Pissarro's own.

The canvas, 54.3 by 65.1 cm, looks down on the river from a high window. The steel arches of the bridge carry a stream of carts and people across the Seine to the roofs and chimneys of the far bank, where a tall factory stack trails smoke into the grey sky. Below, on the near quay, a small steamer sends up a white plume beside moored barges, while dock workers and vehicles crowd the lower left. The light is flat and even, and Pissarro builds the scene from short, broken touches of grey, green and ochre.

The dealer Durand-Ruel bought the painting from Pissarro on 11 December 1896 and kept it in New York until 29 February 1944, when it was sold to Grégoire Tarnopol. After his death in 1979 it came to the Met through his bequest and a gift from his son Alexander Tarnopol in 1980. It is no. 1140 in the 2005 catalogue raisonné and was lent to the 2010 exhibition A City for Impressionism: Monet, Pissarro, and Gauguin in Rouen.