La strada per Osny a Pontoise, brina

The winter this was painted, Pissarro was busy with paperwork. He had settled at Pontoise on the Oise, northwest of Paris, and through 1873 he and a group of painters shut out of the official Salon were assembling a company of their own so they could show without a jury. Pissarro drafted the statutes and modelled them on the rules of a bakers' union in Pontoise, which struck Renoir as uncomfortably close to a trade guild. The first exhibition opened in April 1874, and among Pissarro's entries was another frost picture from this same run of cold mornings. A critic wrote that it looked like palette scrapings spread over a dirty canvas. This road stayed out of that argument and passed quietly through Paris collections for 80 years, until the Zurich arms manufacturer Emil Buehrle bought it in 1953.