Kartoffelernte, Pontoise

Pissarro was living at Pontoise, about 30 kilometres north-west of Paris, in the market-garden country whose vegetables went down the Oise to feed the city. He arrived in 1872 and stayed a decade, painting the same hillsides, kitchen gardens and field workers over and over. In April of the year he made this small canvas he was also hanging five pictures in the first exhibition the independent painters organised for themselves, in a photographer's old studio on the boulevard des Capucines. The subject here is the one he was closest to: the potato harvest, figures at work in a field outside town. He returned to the motif years later at Eragny, in a gouache of 1886 and an oil of 1893, by then painting in separate dots of colour.