Côte des Bœufs at L'Hermitage

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Impressionism frequently puts a premium on the swift or improvised application of paint to the canvas, but this important characteristic is clearly absent in Pissarro's laboriously constructed picture. The close proximity of these two works, painted by two artists then recognised to be at the centre of the movement now called Impressionism, graphically highlighted the artistic tensions native to the Impressionist school.

399:, with its beautiful and highly complicated intricacies of design, its solidity of architecture, and a certain human warmth and tenderness, is perhaps as important an example of this insufficiently appreciated painter's work as any that exists. A writer is to-day almost afraid to use of a work of art the term "laborious". He would probably be supposed to imply depreciation, or to be indulging in the irony that is almost 388:. Although the place-names in the latterly adopted titles of both the Cézanne painting and the Pissarro painting refer to the same location, it is not clear that both paintings actually show exactly the same spot. However, a number of very obvious themes such as those of the strongly coloured roof tiles, the precipitously dropping hillside, and of buildings seen through trees, are common to both pictures. 228:

Sometimes the more lightly applied later layers are seen skipping along the peaks and valleys of an earlier layer. Although Pissarro went to these lengths to effect a particular textural plasticity at the painted surface, he did not always extend this in such a way as to fully represent the actual plasticity of the trees—going so far in some areas as to paint them with no clearly defined edges.

212:. In addition to this local differentiating of the range and compactness of contrasting pigments, Pissarro also variegated the work in a more general way; the predominant colour at the foreground is green, and as the picture recedes, the use of greens is gradually discounted and hues of red are subtly amplified. Just after the completion of this painting, Pissarro made prints such as his 810: 332:. Among those viewing at the exhibition were the Impressionist apologist Georges Rivière, who described it as 'a large landscape by Pissarro', and the critic Amedée Descubes who remarked on the 'attractive painting, a small house hidden away in the forest, which struck us by the firmness and simplicity of its brushwork'. 305:

is in fact one of Pissarro's largest paintings. The densely treated surface, the extensive use of tone, the fragmented and overlaying strokes, and the theme of buildings seen through a screen of trees are all characteristic of his work at the end of the 1870s, and the abstractly and closely conceived

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Pissarro's method of implying depth in this taut and confined picture relies in part on the careful control of light, colour and contrast. Throughout the painting, combinations in close proximity of different colours and tones are observed. At the foreground, physically neighbouring colours and tones

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Pissarro's picture of a view up the hillside, his striking ranks of tree trunks and the lines of the buildings, as well as the atypically vertical format of this landscape painting, all create a strongly vertical dynamic. The sloping lines of the undergrowth, rooftops and hilltop contrast with the

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was displayed next to it. The rude and wintry hillside features, the anonymous peasant figures, and the worked and reworked surface of the Pissarro landscape are in dramatic contrast with the neighbouring Renoir painting's fleeting display of a summertime dance in Paris. A modern conception of

403:. But the charm of a picture like this lies chiefly in its immense and indefatigable laboriousness, in labour so cunning, so swift and so patient, that the more it is piled up, the greater the clarity and simplicity of the result. "Un travail de Bénédictin," as I have heard himself call it." 248:

hill—beneath impasto and contending colours. The critic Charles Ephrussi commented in 1880 on the 'doughy, fleecy, tormented surface' of Pissarro's work, and this imprisoning of matter beneath motif displeased Pissarro, who frequently complained that his method was lacking in visual clarity.

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is heavily worked. In many parts of the painting, brush-strokes are applied over dried and hardened earlier layers of paint. In some places such as in the tree trunks, these layers appear as having been being applied in long and sometimes thin strokes of parallel—or near parallel—directions.

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to consolidate the picture's texture. The technique of painting kaleidoscopically criss-crossing areas has the effect of attracting the eye and drawing it into the pattern, but the price of achieving this is the apparent submerging of details—such as those of the two people ambling down the

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In other areas such as that of undergrowth to the fore, shorter strokes have been criss-crossed, creating an effect not unlike that of a woven fabric. In addition to this labour-intensive technique of layer-building, Pissarro used the more traditional method of applying paint with

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technique of emphatic spatial compression, though Pissarro applies it without the aggression associated with Cézanne's method. Open sky appears to the top right of the picture, in the direction of which the branches of trees reach, echoing the lines of the gables.

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Pissarro's handling of colour in this painting is intricate as is described in the above paragraph but his palette is rather limited. The subdued tonal structure was not achieved by the use of dull earth colours but by mixing pure strong pigments such as

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upward thrust of the work, but this contrast is toned down by the presence of the trees, which veil— almost screening off—the middle-distance, causing the viewer's eye to skid across the surface of the composition. The confident presentment of triangular

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some twenty miles north-west of Paris, where he lived with his family until 1884. The rolling hills of the close by neighbourhood of L'Hermitage provided the setting for a large number of Pissarro's paintings during his stays at Pontoise.

119:. The picture is large by Pissarro's measure, and he described the effort of painting it as the 'work of a benedictine'. Pissarro was proud of the painting, and it remained in his family's possession until 1913. It presently hangs in the 414:

hung in Pissarro's bedroom for many years, and at his one-man show in 1892, he asked an optimistically large figure of 2000 francs for it. In 1913, the artist's wife, Julie Pissarro, sold the painting to the Galerie

989: 376:. The two artists had been friends for many years and had collaborated on a large number of works between 1865 and 1885. This Cézanne painting was also displayed, along with Pissarro's 787:

Pissarro, Critical Catalogue of Paintings Volume II, Joachim Pissarro, Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Buffévent, Champié. Skira, Wildenstein Institute Publications, Paris, 2005,

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Pissarro, Françoise Cachin, Anne Distel, Christopher Lloyd, Barbara Stern Shapiro, John Walsh Jr., The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1980,

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French Pictures at Knoedler's Gallery. Walter Sickert. The Burlington Magazine, Volume 43, No. 244, July 1923. The Burlington Magazine Publications, Limited. p. 40.

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are at their darkest and most densely compact. This use of immediate—sometimes incongruous—contrasts has an exaggerative effect on the foreground's strong colour

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Camille Pissarro, Compiled and introduced by Mikhail Guerman, translated by Mark Ashworth, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1973, ISBN 569084431. p. 8.

297:('undergrowth') landscapes of the late 1870s, this quest for intimacy further constricted and darkened. In spite of this aesthetic contraction, some of the 353: 842: 491:, Anne Distel, Christopher Lloyd, Barbara Stern Shapiro, John Walsh Jr., The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1980, 891: 770: