A Corner of L'Hermitage, Pontoise

This is the painting that opened Basel to Impressionism. In 1912 three young artists pressed the city's public collection to buy it, and it became the first Impressionist work to enter any Swiss museum. The choice puzzled some Baselers at the time, who saw a loose, half-finished-looking view of a French village and wondered why it belonged in a serious gallery. Nearly everything the museum now owns by Monet, Cézanne and the others grew out of that single decision. Pissarro had painted the picture in 1878 in l'Hermitage, the hamlet outside Pontoise where he worked for years, and it shows just an ordinary corner of the place, pale houses and garden walls under trees, with no event and no story staged for the viewer.