The Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise

Pissarro made this in 1877, near the hamlet of L'Hermitage outside Pontoise, where he lived for much of the 1860s and 70s. He showed it that year at the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris. What is striking is how little it behaves like an Impressionist snapshot. Instead of quick, fluid strokes chasing a passing effect of light, the surface is built up thickly, worked over with countless small touches until the paint itself feels dense. A screen of slender tree trunks rises across the whole canvas, cutting it into narrow vertical bands, with two small figures half-hidden among them on the wooded slope. The hillside was a real one behind his house, the Cote des Boeufs, the ridge of the oxen.