Steamboats in the Port of Rouen

Steamboats in the Port of 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 58.133).

Pissarro (1830–1903), born on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, returned to Rouen on 20 January 1896 for his second extended stay in the Norman port city, already enthusiastic, as he wrote, about the beautiful motifs of the quays, which would make famous paintings. He took a room at the Hôtel de Paris overlooking one of the quays, and this canvas is one of several views of the busy harbour that he painted from its window. The Met's 1967 catalogue places it in a group of Rouen pictures of 1896 in which he studied a single subject under changing conditions of weather and light; the bridge scene Morning, An Overcast Day, Rouen, also in the Met, is similar in approach.

The canvas is small, 45.7 by 54.6 cm. Seen from above, a two-masted steamer lies against the cobbled quay at right, almost swallowed by its own white smoke, with barges and cranes crowding the foreground and a tug crossing the grey river. On the far bank stand the wharves and warehouses of the working-class Saint-Sever district, fading into a hazy hillside under a pale, heavily worked sky.

The picture was with the dealer Georges Petit in Paris until 1933, when it was sold at the Hôtel Drouot. It later belonged to Alphonse Bellier, then passed in 1951 through the New York dealer Sam Salz to Arthur J. Neumark, who gave it to the Met in 1958 while keeping a life interest until his death in 1966. It is no. 1123 in the 2005 Pissarro catalogue raisonné and was shown in the 2010 exhibition A City for Impressionism: Monet, Pissarro, and Gauguin in Rouen.