The Red Roofs, Côte Saint-Denis at Pontoise, Winter Effect

Pissarro made this at Pontoise, the town north of Paris where he lived and worked for years, and showed it in the spring of 1877 at the third Impressionist exhibition, one of the shows the group had to mount themselves after the official Salon shut them out. It is a plain hillside hamlet in winter. The red-brown of the roofs is picked up again in the bare fields and the branches, so the same warm note runs right through the cold scene. In front of the houses a screen of leafless trees breaks the view into pieces, and you read the walls in glimpses between the twigs. One critic that April singled the picture out for its strong, simple touch.