Jalais Hill, Pontoise

Too big for the road it was painted on

The canvas is 87 by 114.9 centimetres, close to four feet across. That size is the reason the museum doubts it was finished where it was begun.[1]

“Rather large to set up out of doors in the middle of a road on a hillside, and it must have been painted at least in part in the studio.”

Painting outdoors, in front of the subject, is the practice the Impressionists became known for a decade later. The museum's note is a reminder that a landscape could be begun in the field and finished indoors.[2]

Émile Zola noticed it at the Salon of 1868

The painting hung at the Paris Salon from 1 May to 20 June 1868, as number 2015 in the catalogue, under the title La côte de Jallais. The Salon was the state's annual exhibition and the main way a painter in France reached a public and a buyer.[1]

Émile Zola, then a young novelist writing art criticism for the newspapers, reviewed it in L'Événement illustré on 19 May 1868.[3]

“This is the modern countryside. One feels that man has passed by, turning and cutting the earth… From ordinary reality the painter's temperament has drawn a rare poem of life and strength.”

The English wording above is not fixed. The Met's own wall text and its audio transcript translate the same French passage differently, so quotations of Zola on this picture vary from one publication to the next.

Two other critics recorded by the museum wrote about it that summer. The painter Odilon Redon covered the Salon for La Gironde on 9 June 1868, and the critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary reported in Le Siècle on 29 May 1868 that the canvas drew attention although it had been hung too high.[4]

The title, and the painting that hung beside it

The Salon catalogue printed La côte de Jallais. On 31 December 1930 the artist's son Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro wrote to the picture's owner, William Church Osborn, to say the correct title was La côte du Jalet Pontoise. Museums have kept the Salon spelling. The disagreement stands on the record, one of them the family's.[1]

Which of his paintings hung beside it in 1868 is also unresolved. One account names Le Jardin de Maubuisson, now in the National Gallery in Prague; another names The Hills at L'Hermitage, now at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. No museum record settles it.

How it reached New York

Pissarro kept the painting until his death in 1903. It went to his widow, Julie Vellay Pissarro, in 1904, and then to their son Paul-Émile Pissarro, who sold it for 100,000 francs. The Heinemann Gallery in New York sold it on 15 January 1929 for $7,500. It passed through the William H. Holston Gallery to William Church Osborn, who owned it from 1929 and left it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951.[5]

It was never shown at any of the eight Impressionist exhibitions. It was painted seven years before the first of them opened, and by then it had been sold and hung under a different name.[5]

It carries two catalogue raisonné numbers: number 55 in Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi's catalogue of 1939, and number 116 in volume two of the catalogue by Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, published in 2005.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

This unusually large landscape asks the viewer to move from a rutted foreground through gardens and houses to the cultivated hill. Three details show how Pissarro makes that depth legible without sacrificing the painting's broad, stable order.