The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise

The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, painted in 1876, is among the largest and most ambitious of Pissarro's kitchen garden paintings from the Pontoise period. The gardens at Les Mathurins, a property on the hillside above Pontoise, were among the locations he painted most frequently — their geometric order of vegetable beds and fruit trees providing the combination of cultivated structure and organic growth that he found most congenial. The Nelson-Atkins's version is notable for its scale and its sense of summer abundance: the garden in full growth, its beds heavy with vegetables, the fruit trees above bearing their loads of ripening fruit. The kitchen garden as a subject was among Pissarro's most deliberately political choices: it represented the productive, nourishing labour of the land as opposed to the decorative or leisure-oriented gardens of bourgeois taste, and his large-scale treatment of it was an assertion that this ordinary, working space deserved the same pictorial ambition as any more celebrated subject.

Pissarro structures the composition through the garden's geometric order — rows of vegetables, paths, walls — beneath an open sky. The palette is warm and rich with summer greens, broken by the ochre of the paths and the blue of the sky. Brushwork builds the leafy abundance through varied marks of different directions and sizes.