Edge of the Woods Near L'Hermitage, Pontoise (1879): Art, History and Details

Edge of the Woods Near L'Hermitage, Pontoise (1879) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Edge of the Woods Near L'Hermitage, Pontoise
• Date: 1879
• Creator attribution: Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• 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.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1951.356

A detail from the museum

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.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Pissarro, Joachim, Joachim Pissarro, and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts. Pissarro: critical catalogue of paintings. Paris: Wildenstein Institute Publications, 2005.
• César de Hauke, letter to Henry S. Francis, Nov. 17, 1951, in CMA curatorial file.
• Guy-Patrice Dauberville, letter to Victoria Sears Goldman, July 28, 2015, in CMA curatorial file.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.