Landscape in Pontoise

Pontoise is a market town on the Oise, about 30 kilometres north-west of Paris, and Pissarro spent most of the years between 1866 and 1883 there. He lived in a hamlet on the edge of it called l'Hermitage, below a wooded slope he painted over and over in different weather. This canvas comes from 1877, the year the Impressionists held their third exhibition, which opened on the rue Le Peletier in April with Renoir, Monet, Degas and Cezanne all showing. What Pissarro sent in from Pontoise was farmland and orchards and the backs of village houses through trees, and critics complained that the pictures looked unfinished. The catalogue of the Florentine collection this painting belongs to lists it simply as a landscape near Pontoise, without naming the field or the road.