蓬图瓦兹的雅莱山

Pissarro painted this in 1867, while he was living at Pontoise, northwest of Paris, and it shows the hillside of Les Jalais right where he was staying. This is before Impressionism as we usually picture it. The forms are solid and firmly built, the colour laid on in broad flat areas, closer to Courbet and Corot than to the flickering light of the 1870s. When it went up at the Salon of 1868, the young critic Emile Zola singled it out and praised it, writing that Pissarro had made a rare poem of life and strength out of plain countryside. That notice helped push his name forward as a serious painter of ordinary rural France, its lanes, farm buildings and worked fields.