Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

Les carrières du Chou, Pontoise was painted in 1882 and featured in Camille Pissarro's first one-man exhibition, held the following year in Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris. The concept of the one-man exhibition was still something of a novelty, yet this show, which featured works both from the 1870s and from his more recent, experimental period, including Les carrières du Chou, Pontoise, met with many positive reactions. Pissarro was complimented by Edgar Degas on his recent work, and Edmond Jacques' review, which singled out this painting for particular praise, was exultant: 'Yet go into 9 boulevard de la Madeleine, and you will be astounded. [...] I cannot pretend that certain pieces will not shock you. [...] But you will also experience moments of rapture. The collection is of exceptional interest and even with its defects is a delight' (E. Jacques, quoted in J. Pissarro & C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, Vol. I, Milan, 2005, pp. 180-81).

Les carrières du Chou, Pontoise was painted during a period when Pissarro was increasingly using small, stabbing brushstrokes of colour to render his images, prefiguring the Neo-Impressionism with which he would soon become the godfather. The experimental nature of Pissarro's paintings during this period is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that similar views of the quarries at Le Chou featured in the works of two of his young disciples during the same period: Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Indeed, a landscape by Gauguin now in the National Gallery of Canada has clearly been painted from a viewpoint only a little further behind the one that Pissarro took in this scene. Georges Manzana-Pissarro would later draw a sketch of himself working alongside Cézanne, Gauguin, Guillaumin and Pissarro at the quarries; while the difference in season between Les carrières du Chou, Pontoise and Gauguin's work shows that the two pictures were not painted at the same time, nonetheless this may be the product of one of the painting expeditions that these artists shared.