Уаза близ Понтуаза в серую погоду

Pontoise sits about 30 kilometres down the Oise from Paris, and in the 1870s it was getting its first factories. Pissarro had been living there four years when he painted this, and he put one of them in the middle distance, a low building and a chimney on the far bank, with a rider on the path in front and the grey weather pulling everything to one soft tone. That April the Impressionists had held their second group show in Paris and the notices were brutal, and he was selling almost nothing while supporting a family. Everything is suitable for drawing, he said, everything, and he meant the chimney too, though he thought people's future lay in the countryside rather than in works like that one. The canvas came to Rotterdam in 1951 as a private gift.