The story
The house stands on the old castle mound of Pontoise, on top of medieval ramparts, looking down over the Oise valley that Camille Pissarro painted again and again. He lived in Pontoise for much of the period from 1866 to 1882, and other painters, Paul Cézanne among them, came out to work beside him.
The museum opened here in 1980, for the 150th anniversary of his birth, set up by a society of his admirers. It now goes by the name Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Pissarro-Pontoise, because it also shows the town's older collections while the Musée Tavet-Delacour is closed for works. The walls follow landscape painting from about 1860 to 1910, with pictures by Pissarro and his sons Lucien, Georges and Ludovic-Rodo, by his friend the painter Ludovic Piette, and by landscape painters such as Daubigny, Guillaumin and Caillebotte. The collection also includes a misty view of Herblay on the Seine painted by Paul Signac in 1890.
Pissarro's own early work is here too, among it a canvas of barges moored at La Roche-Guyon, a village on the Seine where he painted in the 1860s, years before the first Impressionist exhibition.
