Landschaft bei Pontoise

Pontoise in 1874 was a market town on the Oise about 30 kilometres from Paris, with a railway station, a river port and market gardens that fed the Paris halls. Pissarro had settled there in 1872 and stayed ten years, and he painted the working parts of it, kitchen gardens, farmyards, the lane climbing to the Hermitage quarter, and the people using them. This canvas has a woman pushing a wheelbarrow past a house, the sort of subject critics complained was too common to be a picture. It went to Stockholm in 1918 and has been in the Swedish national collection ever since, catalogued simply as a landscape from Pontoise.