Paysage à l'Hermitage, Pontoise

Paysage à l'Hermitage, Pontoise at the MASI Lugano, painted in 1875, belongs to the extensive series of hillside views from the L'Hermitage district that Pissarro produced throughout his Pontoise decade. The MASI (Museo d'Arte della Svizzera Italiana) in Lugano, which holds one of Switzerland's most significant collections of twentieth-century art alongside significant nineteenth-century works, acquired this Pontoise landscape as part of its French holdings. The Hermitage hillside — with its mixture of cultivated gardens, orchards, rural paths, and small farmhouses — provided Pissarro with an endlessly variable subject within walking distance of his home. His consistent engagement with this territory rather than seeking more picturesque or scenic subjects elsewhere was both a personal and political choice: this ordinary agricultural hillside, painted with sustained attention, was as worthy of serious pictorial investigation as any conventionally admired landscape.

Pissarro built his canvases with short, woven strokes of color applied in all directions, creating densely textured surfaces that shimmer with atmospheric light. His palette is characteristically muted and silvery — grays, greens.