The Quarry, Pontoise

Pontoise was a working town on the Oise, about 25 miles northwest of Paris, and Pissarro liked to paint the parts of it a visitor would walk straight past. Here it is a quarry, cut into the slope of l'Hermitage, the hillside hamlet where he lived through the 1870s. A woman with a basket comes along the curving track of the rue de l'Hermitage, the road that ran down toward the Saint-Antoine ravine. Chalk and gypsum dug from hills like this one built and plastered the houses of the district, so the scene is really the local economy at work rather than a view chosen for its prettiness. Pissarro gives the raw cut earth the same close attention he gives the trees standing above it.