The Hermitage at Pontoise

The Hermitage at Pontoise at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, painted in 1867, shows the same hillside neighbourhood that would occupy Pissarro for the following fifteen years. The Guggenheim's holding of this early canvas places it within an institution dedicated primarily to modern and contemporary art — an institutional context that underlines the historical importance of Pissarro's work to the development of modernism. His structured, analytically rigorous approach to landscape observation was directly influential on Cézanne, whose Post-Impressionist investigation of form and space was the crucial link between nineteenth-century Impressionism and twentieth-century abstraction. The 1867 Hermitage canvas, painted with more deliberate handling than his mature Impressionist work but already showing the structural intelligence that would characterise it, documents the beginning of the sustained engagement with a specific place that proved one of the most productive practises in nineteenth-century French painting.

The Guggenheim's 1867 canvas is relatively large for an early Pissarro outdoor study, suggesting it was intended from the outset as a serious exhibition work rather than a preliminary sketch. The paint handling is more deliberate than his later Impressionist work, building the hillside's surfaces with careful attention to the fall of light on different materials.