For nearly a decade, Pissarro resided in Pontoise, a commune in the suburbs of Paris. Pissarro enjoyed Pontoise because it was relatively separate from the industrialization rapidly spreading throughout France. Pissarro, however, remained extremely selective in terms of subject matter. The omission of certain conspicuous subjects revealed Pissarro’s political biases. During his time in Pontoise, Pissarro avoided depicting scenes which involved the wealthy, the poor, and other indications class distinctions that emerged as a result of industrialization. Instead, Pissarro concentrated on scenes free from the grasp of industrialization, including a variety of agrarian villages, fields, and smaller gardens (“The Impressionist and the City” xv). Whereas quarries were often featured in nineteenth century landscape paintings, , Pissarro rarely featured this structure in his landscape paintings (“Pissarro and Pontoise” 53). The quarries were representative of the exploitation of lower class workers, as evident in Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1849, fig.1. destroyed) and Seurat’s The Stone Breaker (1882, fig.2) and Farm Women at Work (1882-83, fig.3). In Pissarro’s work entitled La Carrière, Pontoise (1875, fig. 4), the quarry acts merely as an aspect of the landscape. A woman traverses a path near the quarry, but is not directly involved in the surrounding landscape. Although quarries were typically symbolic of humanity’s might over matter, Pissarro continuously depicted these elements in a way which negated their purpose and the implicit indication of human labor (“Pissarro and Pontoise” 54).
Pissarro treated mills in much the same manner. The mills also insinuated industrialization and exploitation. In his work, Lavior et Moulin d’Osny (1883, fig. 5), Pissarro depicted a mill in a manner which nullified the structure’s negative implications. The composition is divided into two portions by a water source, one side containing the mill and the other engulfed by nature. Nature is the more prominent element in the landscape, and the scant human presence transforms the mill into an aesthetic detail rather than a functional structure. The few individuals in the composition appear in nature, suggesting the vital relationship between humanity and nature (“Pissarro and Pontoise” 52). These same sorts of themes can be found throughout Pissarro’s landscapes. While these works indicate that Pissarro was not entirely adverse towards featuring mills and quarries, he was able to successfully nullify their purpose and transform them into aspects of his ideal, utopian society.
While the limited depiction of mills and quarries provides evidence for Pissarro’s anarchist leanings, the complete omission of large chateaux, the inner city of Pontoise, cave dwellings, and fisherman’s quarters speaks to Pissarro’s desire for a harmonious middle class. “The sequence of landscapes that Pissarro painted in Pontoise around 1875 is striking for the limited range of its themes,” due to the wealth of subject matter within Pontoise (Becker et al. 70). The large chateaux, which were found throughout Pontoise, are most representative of an evaded subject matter. Although he often painted the surrounding landscape, “Pissarro never depicted one of the large chateaux” (“Pissarro and Pontoise” 40). This avoidance was obviously intentional, meant as a scorn of the upper classes that reaped the benefits of industrialization and ignored the disparaged, dispossessed, and exploited lower class laborers. The omission of the chateaux also provided Pissarro with the means to criticize “the large capitalized farms of rural France,” which violated his conception of a middle class society in harmony with their agrarian lifestyle and environment (Antliff 44). Furthermore, cave dwellings and fisherman’s quarters were meant to evoke a similar criticism, as the residences for the lowest and poorest societal class. Although many other contemporary artists chose to depict the marginalized in an empathetic manner, such as Manet’s Old Musician (1862, fig. 6), Pissarro ignored the impoverished, as well. Neither the extremely poor nor the extremely rich fell within the anarchist ideal view of society, as neither fulfilled their proper role in contributing to an equal and harmonious community. The rich horded their wealth and often endorsed industrialization, while the poor contributed very little towards the advancement of a more effective society. Therefore, in these omissions at Pontoise, Pissarro defined his political sentiment through the creation of works which deviated from reality to portray anarchist ideals.
In the work Picking Apples at Eragny (1888, fig.7), Pissarro continued his portrayal of the ideal agrarian lifestyle. This particular work was more expressive of the Neo-Impressionist technique in its use of Pointillism, which will be discussed in greater detail relating to Seurat and Signac. Pissarro did not often employ this technique, as he generally maintained a more Impressionist application. He, however, was less concerned with the abstracted forms of Impressionism, creating more detailed, figural pieces which clearly resulted from deliberation and thought. Due to the precision of the Pointillist technique, the works required attention and consideration and could not be completed quickly, as was the intent of the Impressionist movement. Therefore, in Pissarro’s Picking Apples at Eragny, the very minute detailing and the creation of form and shadow through the use of a multitude of colors suggested careful and close consideration of the politicized subject matter. As in his many works from Pontoise, Pissarro depicts a harmonious group of rural people “in a joyful form of social cooperation” (Chu 417).
Pissarro's Politics: How the Neo-Impressionists Incorporated their Anarchist Beliefs 