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Edge of the Woods Near L'Hermitage, Pontoise
Camille Pissarro, 1879
Camille Pissarro was born on the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean to a French-Jewish family. By 1879 he was living in a rural village near Pontoise, in France, as he had since 1872, and was desperately short of money. According to the Cleveland Museum of Art, he painted this large landscape while struggling to sell his work.
A man sleeps in the sun-dappled woods. Pissarro limited himself to pure colours and laid the brushstrokes in neat diagonal patterns, an effect he compared to knitting. The painting is about 125 by 163 centimetres without its frame, big enough to fill a wall, and it was shown at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879.
It is a quiet picture on a large scale, which is unusual. Impressionist landscapes were often small enough to finish in a day.
From the museum record
| Artist | Camille Pissarro |
|---|---|
| Date | 1879 |
| Medium | Oil on fabric |
| Size | Unframed: 125 x 163 cm |
| Museum | The Cleveland Museum of Art |
| Credit line | Gift of the Hanna Fund |
| Accession number | 1951.356 |
| Licence | Open Access (CC0) |
Source: The Cleveland Museum of Art collection record. Facts such as dates, sizes and credit lines come from that record. The write-up above was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the museum record and standard references. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.
