蓬图瓦兹马蒂兰花园一角

For ten years, from 1872, Camille Pissarro lived and painted in Pontoise, a town on the river north-west of Paris. Most of his patch was working land, vegetable plots, orchards, the plain business of the countryside, and critics had mocked him for it, sniffing that he painted cabbages instead of grand scenery. This garden was something finer. Les Mathurins was one of the oldest, grandest properties in his neighbourhood, rented at the time by Maria Deraismes, a well-known writer and campaigner for women's rights. Pissarro painted its lawns and flowering shrubs in 1877, the same year he showed a larger view of the same garden at the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris. The woman in white on the path is a guest strolling the grounds, not a labourer.