L'Hermitage em Pontoise

This canvas is two metres across, the scale a French painter of the day kept for a Salon history picture, and what fills it is a hillside of market gardens on the edge of Pontoise, an hour from Paris by train. Pissarro had moved in 1866 to the quarter called the Hermitage, a scatter of houses and worked plots on the slope above the town, and he painted it again and again. He made this one in 1867, the summer Paris was crowded for the Exposition Universelle and its pavilions of empire and machinery. The walls, the vegetable ground and the few people who worked it get the seriousness that size implies. The painting later belonged to Justin Thannhauser, a dealer in Berlin and then Paris, whose collection came to the Guggenheim in the 1960s.