1879
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Edge of the Woods Near L'Hermitage, Pontoise is a 1879 unspecified by Camille Pissarro, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quiet forest clearing: sunlight filters through leaves, a man naps against a tree, and wildflowers dot the grass. Pissarro painted this when he was broke, using only bright, unmixed colors. He called his brushstrokes "knitting"—tiny diagonal dabs that make the whole scene shimmer. It’s not a grand vista, just a slice of everyday rural life. If you like this, look up impasto—a technique where paint is laid on thick, like butter on toast.
Born to a French-Jewish family on St. Thomas island in the Caribbean, Pissarro painted this monumental landscape when he was desperately poor and struggling to sell his paintings. It depicts a man slumbering in the sun-dappled backwoods of the Hermitage, a rural village near Pontoise, where the artist had been living since 1872. Restricting his palette to pure hues, Pissarro applied brushstrokes in systematic diagonal patterns, producing an effect that he likened to knitting. This canvas was included in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879.
A goat seen from the back standing next to the figure in blue laying in the grass invites the viewer to step inside this serene and beautiful setting.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( piss-AR-oh; French: ; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of Saint Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies).
See the richer artist page
