Edge of the Woods Near L'Hermitage, Pontoise
Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903)
1879
- Medium
- oil on fabric
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 166 x 204 x 16.5 cm (65 3/8 x 80 5/16 x 6 1/2 in.); Unframed: 125 x 163 cm (49 3/16 x 64 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Gift of the Hanna Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
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.
