Côte des Grouettes, near Pontoise

Côte des Grouettes, near Pontoise at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, painted in 1878, shows the hilly terrain above Pontoise where Pissarro had worked for nearly a decade by this date. The hillside road winding through cultivated fields was a motif he painted repeatedly from different angles and in different seasons, and by 1878 his knowledge of this specific terrain was complete. The 1878 date places the painting in the year when his collaboration with Cézanne at Pontoise was at its most productive — Cézanne returned to work alongside Pissarro in 1877, and the mutual influence of the two artists in this period is documented in both their canvases and their correspondence. Pissarro's road compositions of this period have a structural clarity that influenced Cézanne's own developing approach to landscape organisation: the hillside as a series of receding planes, the road as a diagonal axis cutting through the terrain, the sky as a luminous expanse above the dense, varied textures of cultivated land. The Metropolitan Museum's collection of Pissarro works documents this pivotal Pontoise period in particular depth.

The hillside road creates a diagonal recession into the composition that Pissarro uses to establish spatial depth. He renders the various surfaces — packed earth road, grassy banks, cultivated fields — with differentiated brushwork: smooth for earth, broken for grass, more precise for distant rooftops glimpsed above the hill's crest.