The Road to Osny at Pontoise, Hoar Frost

The winter this was painted, Pissarro was busy with paperwork. He had settled at Pontoise on the Oise, northwest of Paris, and through 1873 he and a group of painters shut out of the official Salon were assembling a company of their own so they could show without a jury. Pissarro drafted the statutes and modelled them on the rules of a bakers' union in Pontoise, which struck Renoir as uncomfortably close to a trade guild. The first exhibition opened in April 1874, and among Pissarro's entries was another frost picture from this same run of cold mornings. A critic wrote that it looked like palette scrapings spread over a dirty canvas. This road stayed out of that argument and passed quietly through Paris collections for 80 years, until the Zurich arms manufacturer Emil Buehrle bought it in 1953.