Situated far west of Paris in Brittany, Montfoucault provided Pissarro a haven from the capital as well as the modernizing environs of Pontoise, where he'd settled. Pissarro first began visiting the region in the 1860s, staying at the farm estate of his friend and fellow painter Ludovic Piette. He would return a decade later, on the heels of the first Impressionist exhibition in search of "the true countryside," where the scene in La Batterie à Montfoucault was born.

In 1874, Pissarro once again decamped to the remote hamlet. Feeling the financial and critical pressures of the Parisian art world, Pissarro believed that the quiet solitude of the farms and small fields of northwestern France would provide a much-needed respite and artistic inspiration. A letter from critic Théodore Duret to Pissarro in 1873 further encouraged his relocation, stating:

In contrast, it was his friend Piette who had warned Pissarro of the creative stagnation that could occur if he abandoned Paris for Montfoucault: "Do not think that the pleasure I would have if you stayed with us makes me so oblivious to your interest as to try to influence you to leave the Paris region while it is in your interest to remain there... I even think that you feel the pulse of life in Paris far more than here, where a benumbings and hopeless languor paralyzes you, no matter what you do" (quoted in ibid., p. 138).

Much to the benefit of history, Pissarro’s sojourn to this secluded area would prove to not only personally cathartic, but professionally catalytic (see fig. 1). In contrast to the vast plains and rolling hills of Pontoise, the landscape at Montfoucault offered Pissarro new visual stimuli, and his t.mes there witnessed a radical shift in perspective and engagement with the genre scene. In the small village, set apart from the next town by fifteen miles, Pissarro began to limit his composition and treatment of space to enclosures, interiors and farmyards, often without horizons. The limited planes reflected the diminutive native of the village, reflecting a newfound intimacy and focus on pastoral life.

Though Pissarro would return to Pontoise and the outskirts of Paris after his t.mes in Brittany, the pictorial advancements and fondness for scenes of harvest and village life would continue to proliferate throughout his oeuvre. His penchant for the simple labor and domesticity of life is evidenced by his return to the threshing motif first explored in 1876 and and 1877 (see figs. 2 and 3). Executed in 1883, the present work revisits the scenes of the previous decade with increased vigor indicative of his artistic evolution. Layered with thick daubs of pigment and rich in impasto, the present composition captures a sense of immediacy and intimacy, almost as if one could feel the coarse texture of the hay in the harvest.

The quiet dignity of Pissarro's peasants pays hommage to the mastworks of Millet (see fig. 4), with whom the artist was often compared after the Impressionist Exhibitions. However, Pissarro's directional brushwork and radical facture in works like La Batterie à Montfoucault proclaim an artist at the helm of a new and defining movement. As the heyday of pure Impressionism waned, Pissarro continued to push the bounds of painting. Executed on the precipice of what would soon become known as "Neo-Impressionism," The striated and stacatto brushwork in the present composition anticipates the radical divsionist technique which Pissarro would emphatically support alongside painters like Signac and Seurat in the mid-1880s. As such, works like La Batterie à Montfoucault can be seen as pivotal links between the artist's Montfoucault period and his acclaimed Pointillist compositions (see fig. 5).