The Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise

Red roofs climb a steep hill behind a screen of bare trunks, and two small figures walk down almost lost in the paint. Pissarro called this canvas the work of a Benedictine, and he was proud of it.

The story behind the painting

In 1872 Pissarro moved for the second time to Pontoise, about twenty miles north-west of Paris, and lived there with his family until 1884. The hills of the nearby L'Hermitage neighbourhood gave him many subjects. The Cote des Boeufs, the cattle ridge, is a steep hillside just north of the Oise, named after a path called the sente des Boves. Pissarro painted this spot on five occasions in three decades. He painted this picture in 1877, one of his largest, and described the effort as the work of a Benedictine.

What to look for

The tall format, the ranks of tree trunks and the lines of the houses push the eye upward, while the trees veil the middle distance. The triangular gables climbing the hill show some influence of Paul Cezanne. Greens dominate the foreground and give way to subtly stronger reds further back. The surface is heavily worked, with strokes laid over dried layers and short criss-crossed touches in the undergrowth like woven fabric. The muted tones come not from earth colours but from ultramarine, vermilion, emerald green and chrome yellow, with final accents of pure ultramarine and vermilion.

Meaning and intent

The dense, rhythmic surface draws the eye in, but it also submerges details such as the two people walking down the hill. The critic Charles Ephrussi wrote in 1880 of the doughy, fleecy, tormented surface of Pissarro's work, and Pissarro himself often complained that his method lacked clarity. The picture belongs to his late 1870s sous bois landscapes, more intimate and darker than his airy panoramas of the 1860s. Its slow, laborious build is far from the swift, improvised brushwork often seen as the essence of Impressionism.

Legacy

At the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 it was almost certainly the work listed as Le verger, cote Saint-Denis, a Pontoise, hung beside Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette. The wintry hillside next to Renoir's summer dance showed the tensions inside the movement. Georges Riviere called it a large landscape by Pissarro, and Amedee Descubes praised the firmness and simplicity of its brushwork. Cezanne's The Orchard, Cote Saint-Denis hung in the same room. The painting stayed with Pissarro's family until 1913 and now hangs in the National Gallery, London.