Il giardino dei Mathurins a Pontoise

This is one of the largest and most ambitious canvases Camille Pissarro ever painted, and it shows a real garden in Pontoise, the village northwest of Paris where he lived through the 1870s. The grounds, called Les Mathurins, were rented by Maria Deraismes, a writer and public speaker who was among the first women in France to lecture openly for women's rights. She may be the figure in the long white dress, standing near a mirrored garden globe. Pissarro built the flowerbeds out of strong reds set against green lawn, pushing the new colour theories that a hue looks more intense beside its opposite. In 1877 he sent the picture to the third Impressionist exhibition, one of the shows the group organised themselves after the official Salon kept shutting them out.