Focus on The Banks of the Oise near Pontoise and explore the Historical information.
As a politically engaged artist, Pissarro had fled to London during the Franco-Prussian War. He settled in Pontoise in 1872, after it was safe to return. It was his period of purest Impressionism. He painted a series of paintings along the Oise in 1873. Factories along the bank played a prominent role, a blatant intrusion of modernity into a landscape contemporaries were still depicting as unspoiled nature. This particular image downplays the factory compared to others in the sequence, relegating it to the background, but it is still a significant part of this humdrum section of riverbank on a grey, cloudy day. The variety of treatments he afforded the factory seems to say less about his feelings about that structure in particular than about the purpose of modern painting, which had a duty to incorporate contrasting elements that had traditionally been kept separate.
Impressionism Franco-Prussian War Pontoise Oise London