Artwork · 19th century · Camille Pissarro

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Jalais Hill, Pontoise

Camille Pissarro1867Oil on canvas87 × 114.9 cm

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At a glance

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White houses, striped fields, and a dirt road lie in bright sun below Jalais Hill in Pontoise, a town northwest of Paris.
Camille Pissarro painted it in 1867 while living in Pontoise, and he signed and dated it at the lower right.
He built the houses as simple blocks and the fields as bands of color, so the hillside feels solid enough to touch.

Reading the picture

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Zoom in at the end of the dirt road, beside the bushes on the right. Two people stand side by side. One wears white and the other wears black, and something like an orange parasol rises above them. They are tiny in this wide view, and they help you feel how big the hill really is.
Look at the village in the middle. Houses with white walls and brown or dark blue roofs sit on the slope. Pissarro painted the sunny side and the shady side of each wall in two clear tones, so the houses stand up straight like boxes.
Zoom in on the hilltop at the left. Beside two tall, pointed trees, a tower stands in the distance. In front of it, green, yellow-green, and brown fields run along like stripes. Above the hill, big white clouds swell up into the sky.
Look at the dirt road in front. Dabs of green and brown are laid over the yellowish earth like spots. Up close they are just lumps of paint. Step back and they turn into leaf shadows and tufts of grass on a sunlit road.
Check the lower right corner. On the dark green you can read C. Pissarro, with 1867 beneath it. This is the painter's own name and the year, written with his brush.

When it was painted

In 1867 Pissarro was living in Pontoise, looking out at its hills. He had been born on Saint Thomas, a Danish island in the Caribbean, and had come to Paris more than a decade earlier. With him was Julie Vellay, who had worked in his parents' household. His family did not approve of the match, and the couple raised children together for years before they finally married in 1871.

Money was always tight. That made the Paris Salon of 1868 a real chance for him. This hillside was accepted along with a second country scene, and the two hung together. The landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny, who sat on the jury that year, spoke up for Pissarro's work.

The novelist Émile Zola saw the show and praised this painting warmly in his review. Looking at it, he wrote that this was the modern countryside. He saw a picture with no myths and no famous sights, only a place where people actually lived.

Hard years followed. In 1869 the family moved to Louveciennes, and when war broke out between France and Prussia in 1870, they fled to London. Prussian soldiers took over the house in Louveciennes, and many of the paintings left behind were ruined. In 1872 Pissarro came back to Pontoise and went on painting its hills.

This canvas came to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951, a bequest of William Church Osborn. Look again at the two small figures at the end of the dirt road. The modern countryside Zola admired was just this: an ordinary path in bright sun.

The painter

Camille Pissarro

1830–1903

When painting this, the artist was about 37 years old

All paintings by Camille Pissarro →

More by the same painter

The Harvest, Pontoise (La Récolte, Pontoise)1881

Questions to think about

Look for itCan you find the two people at the end of the road? How are their clothes different?
Why?Why do you think Pissarro filled his canvas with an ordinary country hillside rather than a famous sight?
What about you?Pissarro painted the hills around one town for years. Is there something in the neighborhood we pass every day that deserves a longer look?

Same period