Les Coteaux d'Auvers

Les Coteaux d'Auvers at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, painted in 1882, shows the hillsides above Auvers-sur-Oise — the village where Cézanne had lived and painted under Pissarro's guidance in the early 1870s and where Van Gogh would spend his final weeks in 1890. The hillside terrain around Auvers and Pontoise was shared artistic territory for Pissarro and Cézanne during their intensive collaboration of 1872–74, and Pissarro's return to these Auvers hillsides in 1882 revisits the landscape that had been the site of his most productive artistic exchange. The painting was made in the year before Pissarro's move to Éragny, when he was still working in the Pontoise region that had defined his mature practice for fifteen years. Boijmans Van Beuningen, which holds one of the Netherlands' most important collections of European painting across all periods, acquired this canvas as part of its significant Impressionist holdings that place Pissarro alongside Monet, Sisley, and his other contemporaries.

The hillside composition is structured with Pissarro's characteristic attention to the geometry of agricultural land — field boundaries, paths, and rows of vegetables creating orthogonal patterns across the slope. Over this structural armature he lays his broken-colour surface, the sky particularly handled in the varied blue and white marks of his mature technique.