The Lock at Pontoise

Painted in 1872, early in Pissarro’s years at Pontoise, this canvas shows him at the moment the Impressionist landscape was being defined. Pissarro settled in the village northwest of Paris in 1866 and returned there for much of the following decade, and the surrounding river valley became a laboratory for his slowly built, deeply considered views of rural France. Cézanne, working alongside him at Pontoise, later credited these years of shared practice as a turning point in his own development.