Orchard with Flowering Trees, Spring, Pontoise

This is spring in Pontoise, the plum trees in blossom over a kitchen garden, painted by Camille Pissarro in 1877. In those years Pissarro often had company at his easel outside Paris. The younger Paul Cézanne came out to Pontoise to work beside him, the two men painting the same fields and learning from each other's touch, and the broken, patchy brushwork here is part of what they were working out together. Pissarro does not tidy the scene. The blossom is dabbed on in thick flecks, and the garden is a real one, with its bare vegetable beds and a fence, not a decorative idyll. The canvas later belonged to the painter Gustave Caillebotte, who collected his Impressionist friends, and it came to France as part of the bequest he left the nation in 1894.