Pontoise, the Road to Gisors in Winter

France had a run of unusually hard winters in the early 1870s, with heavy snow, and Pissarro, who had settled at Pontoise on the Oise in 1872, painted the town under it. This is a street rather than a field. The road is the one that leaves Pontoise for Gisors, a market town about 35 kilometres to the north-west, and a few people are out sweeping a thin layer of snow while a low grey sky promises more. The cobbles and the roofs are built from short, broad strokes of colour laid side by side and left unblended. He signed and dated it 1873 in the lower right corner. The Boston collector John Taylor Spaulding bought it from the dealer Durand-Ruel in 1925, and when his bequest came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1948, this road was given the accession number just before a Pissarro of the poultry market at Gisors itself, painted 12 years later.