Pontoise

Pissarro moved to Pontoise in 1866, a market town on the Oise some 30 kilometres northwest of Paris, and took a house in the quarter called l'Hermitage, a slope of vegetable plots and plain walls behind the town. He painted that slope again and again, and at a size usually reserved for the Salon. This canvas is a metre wide.

The subject is ordinary working ground, gardens and roofs and a path up the hill, given the scale a history painter would give a battle.

He sent one of these large Pontoise hillsides to the Salon of 1868, where the young critic Emile Zola singled it out and wrote that here at last was the modern countryside.