Camille Pissarro

Between 1879 and 1883 Pissarro painted extensively in Pontoise, the town which he adopted as his home.  Its rural village life, the meadows and the ploughed fields became the subjects through which he developed his style and experimented with his technique.  Richard Brettell writes, "In 1879 Pissarro began the most extensive period of pictorial experimentation in his career, a period that lasted well into the 1880s ... [and was characterised by] a fundamental questioning of the kind of painting normally associated with Impressionism, the plein-air sketch, and a more complicated, highly mediated relationship with 'reality' than a simply optical one" (Richard Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise, New Haven, 1990, p. 184).

Rather than simply recording an optical sensation, Pissarro turned in 1879 towards an investigation of the relationship between landscape and the painted surface - the different ways in which paint constructs the landscape.  In the present work, Pissarro combines a range of brush strokes, differentiated according to their status within the composition.  Thus Pissarro paints the sky and the boat on the right of the composition with soft rounded strokes, as opposed to the sharp, separate strokes that define the leaves in the trees, or  the road and the carriage in the background.  Commenting on Pissarro's incorporation of the human figure in his landscapes, such as in the present oil, Brettell wrote, "Unlike Cézanne, who all but totally eliminated genre figures from his landscape world, Pissarro populated his scenes with real figures going about their daily lives.  Unlike Monet's figures, who are, for the most part, transient trespassers from the cities who walk along rivers or through country fields, Pissarro's figures belong, or seem to belong, to their surroundings, connected and unproblematic" (Brettell, op. cit., p. 122).