The Banks of the Marne in Winter

In the spring of 1866 this hung on the wall of the Paris Salon, the official exhibition every ambitious painter needed to enter. Pissarro was 35, and he chose to show a stretch of the river Marne on a grey winter day, ploughed slopes running down to the water with almost nothing pretty about it. That plainness was deliberate. His early guide had been the older landscape painter Corot, whose river views were soft and silvery, and here Pissarro went the other way, building the scene in broad, solid blocks of muddy colour. Most critics walked past it. Emile Zola, then a young journalist making his name by defending painters the juries disliked, did not, and singled the canvas out for its honesty. It is a large picture, close to five feet across, a size usually saved for grand subjects and given here to an ordinary cold afternoon outside Paris.