The Quarries of Le Chou near Pontoise

The Quarries of Le Chou near Pontoise (1882) at the National Gallery of Canada belongs to Gauguin's Pissarro apprenticeship years at the Pontoise-Osny area. Pissarro had been a pioneer in painting the working landscapes of industrial and agricultural France — quarries, factories, market gardens, and orchards — rather than the conventionally picturesque scenery that remained the staple of Salon landscape painting. His influence led Gauguin to this quarry subject, which demanded the honest, non-idealizing observation that the Impressionist tradition at its best could provide. Quarry landscapes were also subjects for Cézanne, who found in the warm stone and irregular geology of excavated rock faces the formal complexity he sought in landscape; Gauguin's quarry at Le Chou, though more conventionally handled than Cézanne's Bibémus quarry paintings from twenty years later, belongs to the same recognition that industrial landscape could be as formally productive as any pastoral scene. The National Gallery of Canada's two Gauguins from the early 1880s provide Toronto and Ottawa with important documentation of his formative Pissarro period.

The quarry landscape is painted with the broken, varied brushwork of Impressionist plein air practice — the rocky, worked surface of the quarry rendered through varied mark-making. The palette is naturalistic and responds to the grey stone and ochre soil of the site. No compositional idealisation softens the utilitarian character of the quarry, reflecting Pissarro's influence in its honest directness.