Banks of the Oise at Pontoise

In 1867 there was no such thing as Impressionism yet. The word wouldn't be coined for another seven years, and Camille Pissarro, then 37, was painting the Oise river just north-west of Paris, around Pontoise and the small town of Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône. The countryside here was already changing. Older exhibition records list this canvas as “Landscape with Factory,” and a working building does sit among the trees along the water. Pissarro didn't hide it. He set the new industry into the same quiet bend of the river as the fields and the reflections, painted in the heavy browns and greens he had learned from Corot and Courbet, years before the bright, broken color he later became known for.