"When the history of Impressionism is rewritten in another hundred years, Pissarro's paintings of 1872 and 1873 will be considered his masterpieces."
Painted in 1873, Paysage aux Pâtis, Pontoise, la moisson was executed at the dawn of Impressionism—the rebellious movement largely pioneered by Pissarro and codified by the eight Impressionist Exhibitions between 1874-86. After brief soujourns in London and Louveciennes, Pissarro returned to Pontoise in the summer of 1872. This period marked a turning point for the artist, who up until this t.mes , had not spent more than a few years in any one place. Over the course of the next decade, Pontoise and its immediate surroundings would define Pissarro’s output and the trajectory of Impressionism as a whole.
A bustling agricultural center twenty-five miles northwest of Paris, Pontoise benefited from a rich history as a Middle Age fortress, port town and agrarian district. Combined with the region’s burgeoning industry and railway, Pontoise offered a wealth of subject matter for Pissarro in the late-nineteenth century. An older generation of painters, including Corot, Daumier and Daubigny had also found refuge in the area, providing a loose artistic circle of mentors and colleagues for the younger painter (see fig. 1).
As Richard Bretell writes of this formative t.mes in the early 1870s: “The sheer variety of motifs was more important to Pissarro in these years than at any other t.mes in his career. He was alive to the landscape, allowing its multiple realities to affect him more fully than ever before. The iconographical and the geographical range of Pissarro's Pontoise during the classic Pontoise period separates his aesthetic from the contemporary aesthetics of Monet, Renoir, and Sisley, whose response to the landscape was much less various and much more repetitive in iconography. Pissarro did not search for established or picturesque subjects in the manner described by so many writers on landscape in the middle part of the nineteenth century. Rather, he developed a mode of vision that he applied quite consistently to the various realities around him" (Richard Bretell, Pissarro and Pontoise, New Haven, 1990, pp. 158-60).
“[The main thing] is the will to get up early in the morning and run to work, to withdraw oneself in it, to create a whole world… the will to create a work that the others will have to understand.”
After Pissarro’s return to the area, Paul Cézanne joined his friend and fellow artist, lodging just across the Oise River, first in Saint-Ouen-L’Aumône and then in Auvers. During the two years that Cézanne and his family lived in the region, the painters explored the local topography, working side by side and together pushing the boundaries of pictorial expression (see fig. 2). Works by both Cézanne and Pissarro from this period bear the marked influence of one another. Just as Pissarro introduced Impressionism to Cézanne, it was Cézanne who would, years later, help lead Pissarro away from the movement toward the divisionist tenets of Neo-Impressionism.
“Cézanne, just like all of us, was first influenced by Delacroix, Courbet, Manet… In Pontoise, he experienced my own influence, and I experienced his…. What is curious in that Vollard exhibition at Vollard’s is that one can see a kinship between some of his Auvers or Pontoise landscapes and mine. My goodness, we were always together! But what is certain is that each of us kept the only thing that matters, ‘one’s own sensation.’”
Enlivened by this artistic dialogue and the investigations of his fellow Impressionists, Pissarro began to free his compositions from the more static, Corot-inspired landscapes of the 1860s (see fig. 3). Compared to Pissarro’s earlier depiction of the same region from 1868 (see fig. 4), the present composition witnesses a shift toward a freer, more luminous idiom with an increased emphasis on the effects of light, atmosphere and motion. Pissarro’s palette has softened, his brushwork becoming lighter, more delicate. The rigid geometry of the earlier picture here gives way to a gentler touch, paying homage to the rolling hills and light-dappled landscape around Les Pâtis.
The present composition depicts the fields surrounding the small hamlet, located just west of Pontoise on the Voisne river. In contrast to the earlier picture in the National Gallery of Art, the present work gives full attention to the natural splendor of the region. The obvious presence of the farmers in the 1860s picture are replaced in the present composition by subtle bursts of color dotting the midground, denoting a human presence without distracting from the purity of the landscape.
The harmonious balance between construction and dynamism so deftly achieved in the present composition is that which characterizes the finest works from Pissarro's Pontoise period. Among the most accomplished paintings from the 1870s—and arguably his entire career—Paysage aux Pâtis, Pontoise, la moisson comes to auction for the first t.mes in nearly two decades.