The Harvest, Pontoise

The Harvest, Pontoise (La Récolte, Pontoise) is an oil on canvas painted in 1881 by the French Impressionist Camille Pissarro, signed and dated 'Pissarro. 81' at lower left; it is in the Robert Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession 1975.1.197).

Pissarro lived at Pontoise, outside Paris, from 1872 to 1884, and the town and its fields supplied many of his subjects: village life, woods, rivers and people at work. Rather than glorifying rural labour, he tended to show country people in their ordinary surroundings. The Met notes that potato gathering recurs in his work over some thirty years, in pencil, gouache, oil and prints. In treating it here he took up a subject from the Barbizon painter Camille Corot, while his short, staccato brushwork looks ahead to later artists such as Georges Seurat.

The small canvas, 46 by 55.2 cm, shows three harvesters on a sunlit hillside: a woman in a blue headscarf bends over a sack at left, a man in a white shirt stands in the centre, and a second woman kneels among the plants at right, with filled sacks in the foreground. Behind them a path climbs the slope toward tall poplars and a red-roofed house under a bright, cloud-flecked sky. The museum describes the composition as carefully structured but expressive in tone and handling.

The painting was acquired from Pissarro by Durand-Ruel before 1886 and sold in New York to Erwin Davis, from whom the gallery bought it back in 1901. Mrs H. O. Havemeyer bought it in 1913; her son Horace Havemeyer sold it through Knoedler in 1948 to Robert Lehman, whose collection came to the Met in 1975. It is no. 648 in the 2005 Pissarro catalogue raisonné.