Route d'Ennery
Camille Pissarro·1874
Historical Context
Route d'Ennery near Pontoise was among the rural roads that Pissarro painted repeatedly in the early 1870s, at the beginning of his most productive Impressionist decade. Country roads were among his favourite compositional devices: they provided a clear receding perspective line through the landscape, directing the eye into the picture while allowing him to study the interplay of light on dusty surfaces, verges, and the trees that lined them. The road as landscape subject connected him to the Barbizon painters he had admired, while his handling of it with Impressionist broken colour made the familiar subject new.
Technical Analysis
The road recedes from the foreground with clear perspective diminution, flanked by trees whose canopy creates a dappled light on the road surface. Pissarro works the dusty road in warm ochres and greys, with shadow areas in cooler blue-grey. His broken-colour technique is applied throughout, the even distribution of mark-making across all surfaces being characteristic of his approach to landscape unity.
