Edge of the Woods Near L’Hermitage, Pontoise

The broad stretch of a field meets a bank of tall trees at the edge of the woods near L’Hermitage, the hamlet outside Pontoise where Pissarro worked among the farms and orchards of the valley from the 1870s. This large canvas of 1879 is one of the most ambitious of his figure-in-landscape compositions of those years, in which peasant women bend over the stubble in the foreground while the dense screen of foliage rises behind them. He exhibited it in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879, where such country scenes helped establish the group’s reputation for plein-air observance.