The Banks of the Oise near Pontoise

Pissarro painted this in 1873, the year before he and his friends put on the first Impressionist show in Paris and got laughed at for it. He was living at Pontoise, a market town on the river Oise north of the city, and he painted the river on a grey, overcast day, all silvery light and loose strokes. What sets it apart is what he refused to hide. Tucked into the far bank are a barge, a factory, a smokestack, and a railway, the ordinary machinery of a countryside that was industrializing fast. Most landscape painters of the moment, and most of his fellow Impressionists, quietly left such things out and kept their fields pure. Pissarro let the road, the river, and the field lock together around the smoke, and treated the factory as simply part of the view.