Open Fields with Haystacks near Pontoise

By 1873 Camille Pissarro had settled at Pontoise, a working town in the Oise valley northwest of Paris, and he painted the plain farmland around it, cultivated fields, a low horizon, haystacks left standing after the harvest. Nothing picturesque is being chased here, only the ordinary country as people worked it. Pissarro was the oldest of the circle of friends who, the very next spring in 1874, would mount their own show in Paris and be mocked in the press as Impressionists, and he was the steadiest of them, the only one to appear in all eight of those exhibitions. In these same years the younger Cézanne came out to Pontoise to paint at his side and learn from him. More than thirty years later, long famous himself, Cézanne still signed a catalogue as a pupil of Pissarro.