A Crossroads at L'Hermitage, Pontoise

The Hermitage was a hillside quarter just above Pontoise, 30 kilometres north-west of Paris, covered in market gardens whose produce went down to the capital. Pissarro lived there for ten years from 1872 and painted the same slopes again and again, the cultivated plots, the lanes between them, the houses with their orange tiles. This canvas comes from 1876, by which time his handling had gone blunter and he was building the view out of broad zones of strong colour, the greens of the strips set against red-brown earth, with a few figures going about their day where the roads meet. It is a small picture, under 50 centimetres across. It hangs in Le Havre because a cotton merchant of that port, Olivier Senn, collected it, and his granddaughter gave the collection to the city museum in 2004.