"The majority of Pissarro's paintings made at Pontoise represent L'Hermitage, where the family lived during the 1870s in a sequence of rented houses. L'Hermitage had an equivocal identity, packed into a confined space between ridges were numerous smallholdings and jardin potagiers. These restricted and sloping properties were labour intensive and little adapted to mechanization" (R. Thomson, Camille Pissarro, London, 1990, p. 35). Pissarro's rural works of this period often display a clear debt to Cézanne in subject, composition and handling of paint. They have about them an intimacy and sense of empathy with the peasants of Pontoise which is also entirely reminiscent of Cézanne.

Discussing these Pontoise pictures, Christopher Lloyd writes: "Where the combination of a firmly controlled composition with a richly worked surface was successfully fused, Pissarro produced canvases that exude an overriding feeling of spatial harmony... His composition retains a rigidly controlled geometrical basis, in which figures and background are skillfully enmeshed. It is as though Pissarro embraces the spirit of Monet and Renoir in the context of Cézanne." (C. Lloyd and A. Distel, Pissarro, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1980-81, p. 79)