The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise

This large 1876 canvas from the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City shows the garden of Les Mathurins, a property near Pontoise that Pissarro painted repeatedly from its fruit trees and kitchen garden beds. The walled kitchen garden was a recurring motif for Pissarro — intimate, productive, enclosed — that he distinguished from the broader pastoral landscape through its sense of cultivated order. The Nelson-Atkins version is among the most ambitious of the Mathurins garden paintings, showing the space in full summer growth with a sense of ordered abundance.

Pissarro structures the composition through the garden's geometric order — rows of vegetables, paths, walls — beneath an open sky. The palette is warm and rich with summer greens, broken by the ochre of the paths and the blue of the sky. Brushwork builds the leafy abundance through varied marks of different directions and sizes.