The Pond at Montfoucault, Winter Effect

In May 1874 the first Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris, and its reception left Pissarro discouraged. That summer he went to stay with his friend the painter Ludovic Piette, who farmed at Montfoucault, a hamlet on the border of Normandy and Brittany, and after a short spell back in Paris he returned to spend the winter there. This is the pond behind the farm under a low, grey cold, the countryside going about its work far from the arguments of the capital. Pissarro came back to Montfoucault several times in the 1870s. Piette died there in 1878, and the visits stopped.