Le Jardin municipal, Pontoise

Pissarro spent much of the early 1870s in Pontoise, a town on the Oise northwest of Paris, painting its fields and river banks. Here he turned instead to the public garden, where townspeople in their good clothes walk the terraces with their children on a mild day. It is a lighter, more sociable subject than his usual working countryside. Off to the left, past the spire of the town church, the land opens toward the plain that runs down to Paris. He painted this in 1873. The following spring he would help hang the first Impressionist exhibition and show a Pontoise scene much like this one, at a moment when critics still treated such loose, everyday paintings as barely finished.