Figure 25 village in the hills behind Bougival, and Ghatou, on the Seine itself a little nearer Camille Pissarro (French, 1830-1903). View from Paris: "[Louveciennes] is the real village! Ghatou is far away; and those little Louveciennes, circa white flurries which the wind stirs up round you on the road, they are not rice 1869. Oil on canvas, 3 49 52.7 x 81.9 cm (20 A X powder . . . they are real dust." This seems to be a clear, unequivocal demarca- 32V4 in.). London, National Gallery, tion between suburb and "real" country, but two paintings act as a salutary warn- NG3265. Reproduced by ing. In Pissarro's View from Louveciennes [FIGURE 25], probably painted in the courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, spring of 1869, the place is presented as a rural village, with simple peasants, but London. in Renoir's view of the same site [FIGURE 26], probably painted in the summer of Figure 26 Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 1870 (the same time as La Promenade}, the village space has been appropriated A Road in Louveciennes, by a family of fashionably dressed Parisian day-trippers. Because of the choice of circa 1870. Oil on can- vas, 38.1 x 46.4 cm (15 figures, these two canvases are pictures of different genres, but the difference x 18V in.). New York, 4 Metropolitan Museum of between them is an expression of a far wider set of debates about the relationship Art, The Lesley and between city and country and between notions of "nature" and artifice. Emma Sheafer Collection, Bequest of Renoir was living with his mother at Louveciennes in 1870 when he Emma A. Sheafer, 1973, 1974.356.32. created La Promenade. Late in the summer of 1869 he and Monet had painted a number of pictures at La Grenouillere [FIGURES 27, 28, for example], viewing the place from much the same angle as Heilbuth's By the Waterside [FIGURE 24]. In a letter to Frederic Bazille, Monet described his own versions of the place as 40