Open Fields with Haystacks near Pontoise

Open Fields with Haystacks near Pontoise at the National Gallery of Art, painted in 1873, predates Monet's celebrated Grainstack series by seventeen years and demonstrates that the haystack or grainstack as a subject for sustained Impressionist investigation was Pissarro's invention rather than Monet's. Pissarro's 1873 haystack landscape addresses the same formal problem that Monet would later pursue serially: the way a solid, simple geometric form — the cone of stacked grain — responds to changing light conditions and atmospheric effects. Pissarro's version is a single exploration rather than a serial investigation, but it establishes the subject's possibilities with great confidence. The collaboration between Pissarro and Cézanne in the Pontoise years is documented in canvases like this one: Cézanne visited Pissarro at Pontoise in 1872–74, and the structured, geometrically aware approach to the landscape that Pissarro was developing in works like this one was directly influential on the younger artist's own developing approach to the motif.

Pissarro uses a relatively open, horizontal composition with the haystacks as vertical accents in the middle ground. Brushwork is broken but structured, the sky built in layered horizontal strokes. The palette is warm — golden ochres for the cut fields, deep greens for distant hedgerows — with characteristic grey-blue in the sky.