The Chemin des Mathurins Climbing through Fields, Pontoise

Held at the Musée d'Orsay, this 1879 canvas depicts the Chemin des Mathurins climbing through fields at Pontoise — part of Pissarro's systematic documentation of the routes and paths he walked daily in the Pontoise landscape. By 1879 he had been working around Pontoise for nearly a decade and knew this terrain with complete intimacy. His paintings of the 1870s established Pontoise as an Impressionist landscape as identifiable as Monet's Argenteuil or Renoir's Montmartre. The Musée d'Orsay holds the definitive public collection of French Impressionism, and its Pissarros form a comprehensive survey of his Pontoise achievement.

The rising path structures the composition through strong upward diagonal, with cultivated field strips on either side. Pissarro's 1879 technique — after almost a decade of Pontoise practice — is at its most confident and assured: varied marks that capture the specific texture of ploughed field, path surface, and sky with complete authority.