Street in Pontoise (Rue de Gisors)

Street in Pontoise (Rue de Gisors) at the Belvedere in Vienna, painted in 1868, shows Pissarro turning from the countryside surrounding Pontoise to the town's streets themselves — a subject that anticipated his later urban series by twenty years. The Rue de Gisors, one of Pontoise's commercial streets, offered the combination of architectural structure and social activity that he would develop into his full urban practice in the 1880s and 1890s. The Belvedere, which holds the great Austrian national collection as well as significant European paintings, acquired this work as part of its French nineteenth-century holdings. The 1868 date places the canvas in Pissarro's pre-Impressionist formation, when he was still working out the formal language that would define his mature practice, and the street subject — ordinary commercial life in a provincial French town — demonstrates his consistent commitment to the unglamorous and socially specific as proper subjects for serious painting.

The composition descends gently along the road surface, flanked by stone walls and modest buildings that create a narrow corridor of space. The palette is characteristically sober for this period — ochres, grey-greens, and pale sky — applied with a more solid, less broken touch than Pissarro's later Impressionist work.