A Corner of L'Hermitage, Pontoise

In September 1922 the Landmandsbank, one of Denmark's biggest banks, collapsed, and the Copenhagen insurance director Wilhelm Hansen had to sell. Between 1916 and 1918 he had gathered a large group of French paintings for his country house at Ordrupgaard, north of the city. He offered the whole collection to the Danish state, which did not buy, and about half of it went abroad. This canvas was among the pictures that left. In 1923 the Swiss collector Oskar Reinhart bought it for his house in Winterthur, and it has stayed there ever since. Pissarro had painted it almost 50 years earlier, in 1874, at l'Hermitage, the hamlet on the edge of Pontoise where he was living. Plain stone farmhouses sit under a bare hillside, walled kitchen gardens run in front of them, and on the path below a woman stands near a grazing horse.