Landscape was central to Pissarro’s art. He was both traditional and innovative in his approach to the subject. Imbued with a strong sense of the French landscape tradition from Poussin to Seurat, he was none the less ready to respond to new challenges and the latest ideas. In his long career he reflected closely the major changes of approach to landscape in French painting as it evolved from the 1860s to the end of the century.

After his arrival in France in 1855 Pissarro responded to the art of the Barbizon painters, precursors of the Impressionists who had been producing naturalistic landscapes in the countryside around the Forest of Fontainebleau since the 1840s, often taking Dutch seventeenth-century painting as their model.