Open Fields with Haystacks near Pontoise

Painted in 1873 near Pontoise, where Pissarro lived for much of the 1870s, this National Gallery of Art canvas shows open grain fields with haystacks — a subject that Monet would later make famous in his Grainstacks series of 1890–91. Pissarro's treatment predates Monet's by seventeen years and demonstrates his consistent interest in the working agricultural landscape of the Oise valley. His collaboration with Cézanne during the Pontoise years was transformative for both artists; Cézanne adopted Pissarro's commitment to structured observation of landscape, while Pissarro absorbed something of Cézanne's constructive discipline in return.

Pissarro uses a relatively open, horizontal composition with the haystacks as vertical accents in the middle ground. Brushwork is broken but structured, the sky built in layered horizontal strokes. The palette is warm — golden ochres for the cut fields, deep greens for distant hedgerows — with characteristic grey-blue in the sky.