Resting in the Woods (côte des Grouettes), Pontoise

1878 was the year the Impressionists did not exhibit. Paris was given over to the Exposition Universelle and its crowds on the Champ de Mars, and the group let the season pass. Pissarro spent it where he had been living for six years, at Pontoise, about 30 kilometres north-west of the city, on a wooded rise called the côte des Grouettes on the road out of town. He signed and dated the canvas that summer, and it looks like high summer, with the fields beyond the trees already gone yellow. Three figures sit in the shade in the foreground while the ground drops away behind them towards the hills. Another son was born to him in Pontoise that November, and by the following spring he was showing with the group again in Paris.