The Quarries of Le Chou near Pontoise

Painted in 1882 at Pontoise under Pissarro's influence, this landscape of a quarry near Pontoise shows Gauguin exploring the kind of industrial-rural subjects that Pissarro himself favoured — the French landscape marked by human labour rather than idealised pastoral beauty. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa holds this work. Pissarro had moved beyond conventional picturesque landscape toward more honest depictions of working environments, and Gauguin followed his lead in this early canvas.

The quarry landscape is painted with the broken, varied brushwork of Impressionist plein air practice — the rocky, worked surface of the quarry rendered through varied mark-making. The palette is naturalistic and responds to the grey stone and ochre soil of the site. No compositional idealisation softens the utilitarian character of the quarry, reflecting Pissarro's influence in its honest directness.