This weekend we’re visiting what used to be a small village on the bank of the River Oise, where several of the French Impressionists developed their skills in painting landscapes en plein air. In yesterday’s first article we had reached 1876, the year of the second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.

In complete contrast to his few landscapes influenced by Paul Cézanne, in 1876 Pissarro also painted some views of the commercial barges trading on the River Oise, including this of Barges at Pontoise, the only canvas in which the boats dominate his composition. This painting remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death, and wasn’t even exhibited until 1936.

The Oise near Pontoise in Grey Weather is another of Pissarro’s views of the River Oise from 1876.

The Rainbow, Pontoise, which Pissarro painted in 1877, was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition that year. It’s a panoramic view of the fields around the neighbouring area of Épluches viewed from Pontoise, with a modest and realistic rainbow.

Around 1877, when Pissarro was probably in company with Paul Cézanne at Pontoise, the pair of them painted the same motif hidden or revealed by the same trees. Pissarro’s version of Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise, above, is the more famous, and captures texture in everything, from the smoother surface of the track to the smaller branches, and presents an essay on the form and structure of trunks and branches.

Cézanne’s La Côte Saint-Denis à Pontoise shows little or no anatomical basis to the construction of his trees, whose branches are only loosely related to foliage. He simplifies throughout, with little or no texture, and more basic shadows, on the trunks, and the foliage is depicted as amorphous areas of leaf colour.

Béliard’s Moulin de Chauffour, Effect of Snow (1878) is another winter scene from the area near Pontoise, and is significantly less painterly than Pissarro or Cézanne.

By 1880, when Pissarro painted this Landscape at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise, his work was losing its conventional Impressionist facture, as he adopted smaller, staccato brushstrokes and his style became more ‘pointillist’.

Pissarro also started to transfer his attention from the land to its inhabitants, here the rural poor of these Cottages at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise (1880).

Pissarro’s Peasant Woman Digging, the Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise (1881) shows two women working in the vegetable garden of this large house in the village. This painting was first shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition the following year.

The Harvest, Pontoise, from 1881, is one of several of Pissarro’s paintings focussing more closely on agricultural activities, and now becoming overtly ‘pointillist’. Because of the brushwork involved, he couldn’t have painted this in front of the motif, and it turns out to be a second copy of an earlier and apparently identical painting.

This increasingly human content, in paintings such as his Peasant Woman and Child Returning from the Fields, Auvers-sur-Oise from 1881, drew comparisons with Millet, from whom Pissarro sought to distance himself in terms of modernity. This painting was bought by Durand-Ruel later that year, and shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition.

Pissarro later concentrated his attention on Éragny, then cityscapes of Paris. Cézanne returned to his family home in Aix-en-Provence, and Béliard became the mayor of Étampes further south. Today Pontoise is part of the ‘new town’ of Cergy-Pontoise, and its population has grown to well over 30,000, within an urban area of nearly a quarter of a million.

This weekend we travel to what used to be a small village of around six thousand on the bank of the River Oise, to the north-west of Paris. Pontoise was the centre of early Impressionist landscape painting in front of the motif, and appears in hundreds of works painted there from the late 1860s. It’s where Camille Pissarro lived and developed his skills, Paul Cézanne learned to paint en plein air, and others including Vincent van Gogh and Charles Daubigny painted.

The country around Pontoise has also been painted extensively. In these two articles, I include some from Auvers-sur-Oise, a little upstream, but exclude those from Ennery to the south, Éragny down river, where Pissarro settled later, and Osny to the north-west, all names you’ll see in the titles of significant Impressionist paintings.

We start in 1867, in the early days of the development of Impressionism, with Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise. This realist view shows the hill of Les Jalais at l’Hermitage, where Pissarro lived at the time, viewed from the Chemin des Mathurins in Pontoise.

The year after he painted these Apple Trees at Pontoise, the House of Père Gallien (1868), the Pissarro family moved to Louveciennes, also to the north-west of Paris, where they intended to settle down in a large rented house. It was here that Pissarro first got to know Alfred Sisley well, when they painted in company, and alongside Monet and Renoir, all four of them starving and fighting off despair from their lack of sales.

The forgotten Impressionist Édouard Béliard may well have painted Boulevard de Fossés in Pontoise alongside Pissarro, Cézanne and Guillaumin in 1872.

Béliard’s Pontoise, View of the Lock (1872-5) was probably among his paintings shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. Its composition is reminiscent of Sisley’s The Canal Saint-Martin, Paris from 1872, and its style is similar to those of Pissarro and Sisley at that time.

Paul Cézanne started learning to paint en plein air alongside Pissarro’s easel in 1873, when he painted this view of the House of Père Lacroix, Auvers-sur-Oise. As with all beginners, he took a long time getting the painting to look right, so different sections of the roof were painted several hours apart, as reflected in the orientation of the shadows here.

This view from Cézanne’s first campaign along the River Oise shows the northern bank near the hamlet of Valhermeil, slightly up-river from Pontoise.

Of all the paintings shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874, Cézanne’s The Hanged Man’s House, Auvers-sur-Oise (1874) was among the most successful, as he sold it to the collector Count Doria for three hundred francs.

Béliard’s Pothuis Quay in Pontoise, Effect of Snow from 1875 may have been exhibited at the second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, and is similar in subject and style to the winter scenes painted around Louveciennes by Pissarro and Sisley from 1870 onwards.

In February 1875, with snow still falling, the Pissarros returned to their house in Pontoise, for Camille to paint there again. Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise (1875) strikes a fine balance between an impression captured in haste, and sufficient detail to make it more than just a passing moment.

That year a few of Pissarro’s paintings appear to have been influenced by Cézanne. Perhaps the best example is The Small Bridge, Pontoise, which could easily be mistaken for one of Cézanne’s views in the woods of northern France.

View of the Côte des Gratte-Coqs, Pontoise from the same year is also less distinctively one of Pissarro’s works.

In 1876, Pissarro painted this large view of one of the gardens in Pontoise: The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, belonging to the Deraismes Sisters. In fact, the sisters were only renting this large and impressive property, just down the road from where the Pissarros lived, in the Hermitage district of Pontoise. It had formerly been a convent until the French Revolution.