View of Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône

View of Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône at the Yale University Art Gallery, painted in 1876, shows the town on the right bank of the Oise opposite Pontoise — Pissarro's immediate neighbor and the subject of multiple views from his hillside vantage points. The Yale University Art Gallery, the oldest university art museum in the western hemisphere, holds this work as part of its significant French nineteenth-century collection. Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône, with its old abbey and its position at the junction of the Oise and Seine rivers, was a specific topographical fact in Pissarro's daily landscape, and his multiple views of it from different positions and in different seasons reveal the systematic character of his territorial investigation. The 1876 date places this canvas in the middle of his most productive Pontoise decade, when his technique was fully formed and his knowledge of the terrain was deep enough to allow him to move freely between the intimate and the panoramic within the same working 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.