L'Hermitage à Pontoise

Pissarro painted this in 1867, in a hamlet called the Hermitage on the edge of Pontoise, northwest of Paris. It was still years before the word Impressionism existed, the first group exhibition was seven years off. What he chose to paint was not a grand vista but a working slope of kitchen gardens, stone houses, and villagers bent over their plots. He gave that ordinary hillside the scale and seriousness usually kept for history painting. Pissarro lived in and around Pontoise on and off for years, and it was in these plain agricultural corners, a few years on, that the younger Cezanne came out to paint at his side.