The Public Garden at Pontoise

In April 1874 a group of painters rented Nadar's old photography studio on the boulevard des Capucines and put on their own exhibition rather than wait on the Salon jury. Pissarro sent five canvases, one of them a view of the public garden at Pontoise painted the year before, which is in St Petersburg today. This is the same garden, worked in the same period. He was living in the town and usually painted its fields and market roads, so the terraces filled with well-dressed families are a subject he came to rarely. Off to the left the land opens towards the Montmorency plain and Paris beyond it, with the spire of the town's own Notre-Dame standing in front of the view.