The Public Garden at Pontoise

Pissarro’s paintings of the mid-1870s are largely devoted to the fields and roads near his home in Pontoise. Here, he turned to a more urban subject, of the type favored by colleagues such as Monet and Renoir: the town’s public garden. The view across the Montmorency plain toward Paris may be glimpsed at left, beyond the spire of Pontoises Notre-Dame church. But rather than emphasizing the vista, Pissarro focused on the park’s terraces, populated by well-dressed bourgeois and their children. He exhibited a similar scene, painted the year previously (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.