Rabbit Warren at Pontoise, Snow

Snow at Pontoise was a subject Pissarro approached repeatedly, finding in winter conditions a simplification of colour and form that appealed to his structural instincts. The 1879 Rabbit Warren in snow, at the Art Institute of Chicago, shows the hillside terrain of Pontoise in winter: the excavations of the rabbit warrens visible as darker marks in the white snow, the sparse vegetation reduced to its essential linear forms. Snow scenes required painters to solve the problem of rendering white without losing spatial depth, and Pissarro's solution — subtle warm-cool variations within the snow field — is characteristically intelligent.

Pissarro renders snow using a varied palette of warm and cool whites — ochre-tinged in areas catching direct light, blue-grey in shadow — that gives the white field spatial depth and prevents the surface from becoming a flat plane. The dark marks of rabbit warrens provide compositional anchors and scale indicators.