1872
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Lock at Pontoise is a 1872 unspecified by Camille Pissarro, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a river lock on a cloudy day, water churning and sky heavy with gray. Pissarro painted this in one go, right outside. He didn’t sketch first—just slapped pure color on canvas in quick, choppy strokes. That rushing water and damp air feel real because he worked fast, catching light before it changed. If you like this, look up impasto.
Pissarro was instrumental in developing the radically new Impressionist technique of painting quickly outdoors to capture fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. The rushing water and overcast sky in this view of a river lock near the artist’s home at Pontoise, a rural commune about 17 miles northwest of Paris, are rendered with rapid, broken brushstrokes of pure color. Painting directly on canvas without preliminary drawing, Pissarro may have executed this work in a single session. The shimmering surface of broken color conveys the sensation of natural, outdoor light.
The river portrayed here is 212 miles (341 km) long.
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
