Côte des Grouettes, near Pontoise

The Côte des Grouettes was a hillside road above Pontoise, and Pissarro painted it in 1878 — a year when he was at the height of his productive engagement with the Pontoise countryside. The Metropolitan Museum's canvas shows the road winding uphill through farmland, combining his interest in the human modification of landscape (paths, fields, hedgerows) with the structural challenges of depicting hillside terrain. Roads were compositional devices as well as observed facts: they guided the eye into the picture's depth and connected foreground to middle distance with a naturalness that linear perspective formulas could not replicate.

The hillside road creates a diagonal recession into the composition that Pissarro uses to establish spatial depth. He renders the various surfaces — packed earth road, grassy banks, cultivated fields — with differentiated brushwork: smooth for earth, broken for grass, more precise for distant rooftops glimpsed above the hill's crest.