Il Boulevard des Fossés, Pontoise

The road in this picture was about ten years old when Pissarro painted it in the autumn of 1872. It runs along the line of the moats that had defended Pontoise in the Middle Ages, filled in and planted with trees, which is what a great many French towns were doing with their old fortifications while Paris itself was being cut into boulevards. The large houses and the well-dressed people under the trees belong to that new part of town, 30 kilometres northwest of the capital and an easy train ride from it. Pissarro had settled back in Pontoise that summer, after the war and a year in London, and he went on working in and around the town for the next decade.