Pissarro at Pontoise: Picturing Infrastructure and the Changing Riverine Environment

Abstract

In 1872, Camille Pissarro rendered the water of the Oise River rushing over a low dam with rapid, broken brushstrokes of pure color. Canal barges are moored to the opposite bank, their masts mirroring the young trees that line the bank and lead to the riparian village of Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône in the background. Here the artist depicts aspects of daily life on a major tributary of the Seine, but also how civil engineering projects transformed France’s river ecosystem. Throughout the nineteenth century, a range of new infrastructure projects were undertaken—from river dredging to the building of locks and dams—to create a predictable and reliable transportation network. How other signs of industrialization and modernity—like train bridges and riverside factories—manifested in the art of this period is well understood. Yet the presence of riverine infrastructure in the landscape is rarely discussed. Pissarro’s depictions of the Oise River offer a rich entry point to consider how these interventions radically altered the nature of these waterways and how the changed environment was approached by artists. Placing his pictures within the context of the infrastructure projects executed along the river, and in dialogue with the naturalist approach of Charles-François Daubigny to this same river, brings into focus Pissarro's ecological gaze, which registered the river as a space that was both natural and engineered.

Full text

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Pissarro at Pontoise: Picturing Infrastructure and the Changing
Riverine Environment
Genevieve Westerby
In 1872, Camille Pissarro rendered the water of the Oise
River rushing over a low dam with short, dashed brushstrokes
of pure color (Figure 1). Painted near his home in the rural
French village of Pontoise, it features aspects of daily life on
this major tributary of the Seine. Canal barges are moored
to the opposite bank, their masts mirroring the slender trees
that line a path leading to the riparian village of Saint-Ouen-
l’Aumône in the background. With his choice of site, where
the river splits into two sections to ow around the small
island of Saint-Martin, Pissarro depicts how civil engineering
transformed the ecosystem of the Oise River.
Throughout the nineteenth century, a range of new
infrastructure projects were undertaken in France’s rivers.
These projects aimed to create a predictable and reliable
transportation network; to turn what was a mostly natural
system into one that would suit the needs of an increasingly
industrialized capitalist economy. Nowhere were these
projects more visible or more transformative than on the Seine.
Riverbeds were dredged and locks and dams were constructed
to overcome two major hindrances to the river’s commercial
exploitation—itsinconsistentdepthanditstendencytoood.
Canals were dug to form new connections between major
river systems to further facilitate the speedy transportation of
goods. By midcentury, the Seine was the main artery of the
nation’s system of rivers, transporting nearly ninety percent of
goods to and from the heart of Paris.1
These projects also had a profound effect on the
1 I thank Margaret Werth and my fellow dix-neuvièmistes at the University
of Delaware for their insightful and generous feedback during the editing
process. I am also grateful for the comments and suggestions I received from
the peer reviewer and from the journal’s editor. Much of the archival research
that informs this article was made possible thanks to the Global Dissertation
Development Grant, generously awarded by the University of Delaware’s Art
History department.
James Henry Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity,
Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2008), 67; and Denis Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en
France: Du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994), 227-30.
Even by 1882, when railroads were well established and quickly becoming
the preferred method for moving cargo, waterways still accounted for forty-
one percent of all transported goods. Unless otherwise noted, all translations
are by the author.
environment, which caught the attention of artists and writers
alike. In Emile Zola’s novel L’oeuvre, for example, the author’s
protagonist, the struggling painter Claude Lantier, laments that
a newly constructed dam downriver raised the level of the
Seine and changed the landscape at the village of Bennecourt.2
Lantier had painted there several years before, but when
he later returned to the site, he could scarcely recognize it.
Islands were submerged and quiet armlet sections of the river
were broadened such that there were “no more pretty nooks,
no more rippling alleys to get lost in; a disaster that inclined
onetostranglealltheriverengineers!”3 Impressionist painters
were also drawn to these feats of engineering and the changed
environment around them. Gustave Caillebotte included
onesuchdam,atBezons,inaviewofshingontheSeine
in 1888 (Figure 2). The turbulent, white-foamy water of the
dam is visible in the background on the upper right, while
shermenintheirboats,lashedtoanchoringpoles,bobinthe
foreground.
Fluvial infrastructure projects are just one example of the
technological, industrial, and social transformations impacting
the environment in this period. Coal-powered trains rushed
along newly constructed bridges, factories lined the river’s
banks and polluted its waters, and fashionable Parisian tourists
overwhelmedruralshingvillagesandcloggedriverslikethe
Seine with rented boats. Scholars have studied extensively
these aspects of modernity and how they manifested in the art
of this period.4 Yet the presence of riverine infrastructure in,
2 Like many details included in Zola’s work, this anecdote was likely drawn
from his life experiences. Zola knew the landscape at Bennecourt well as he
lived there, off and on, between 1866 and 1871.
3 Émile Zola, L’oeuvre (Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie, 1886), 429: “Plus de jolis
coins, plus de ruelles mouvantes où se perdre, un désastre à étrangler tous les
ingénieursde lamarine!”Lantier furtherexclaimedat thelossof aspecic
island: “Tiens!cebouquetdesaules quiémergent encore, à gauche, c’était
leBarreux,l’îleoùnousallionscauserdansl’herbe,tutesouviens?...Ah!les
misérables!”(Here!Thisclusterofwillowtrees that arestillvisible,to the
left, it was the Barreux, the island where we went to chat in the grass, you
remember?Ah!Thewretches!).
4 The work done by art historians like T.J. Clark, Richard Brettell, and Robert
Herbert is foundational for placing river landscapes within the social matrix
ofworking-classlabor,bourgeoisleisure,andthespreadinginuenceofParis.
See Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (New York: Knopf, 1984); Brettell and Scott Schaefer, A Day in the
Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape (Los Angeles: Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, in association with The Art Institute of Chicago and
Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1984); and Herbert, Impressionism: Art,
Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
Recently, scholars like Maura Coughlin and John Ribner have begun to employ
ecocritical and environmentally focused approaches to surface the effects
industrialization had on the environment and in what ways artist’s explicitly or
implicitly represented these effects in their work. See Coughlin, “Biotopes and
Ecotones: Slippery Images on the Edge of the French Atlantic,” Landscapes:
The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language 7, no.
1 (2016): 1–23; and Ribner, “The Poetics of Pollution,” in Turner, Whistler,
Monet: Impressionist Visions, ed. Katharine Lochnan (Toronto: Art Gallery of
Ontario, in association with Tate Publishing, London, 2004), 51–63.
I thank Margaret Werth and my fellow dix-neuvièmistes at the University
of Delaware for their insightful and generous feedback during the editing
process. I am also grateful for the comments and suggestions I received from
the peer reviewer and from the journal’s editor. Much of the archival research
that informs this article was made possible thanks to the Global Dissertation
Development Grant, generously awarded by the University of Delaware’s Art
History department.

156
GENEVIEVE WESTERBYATHANOR XXXIX
vessels.8 These lock-and-dam pairs subdivided a waterway
into a series of level segments, called reaches, which gradually
lower stepwise along a river’s length to alleviate any change
in elevation.9 The water level was further regulated with a
déversoir (or weir), a type of low, xed dam installed in a
non-navigable section of a river that acted like a release valve
during periods of high water.
The canalization of the Oise began in 1827 and
stretched from the upriver village of Compiègne to the river’s
conuencewiththeSeine.Sevendamsandlockswerebuilt
to achieve the engineers’ goals, which included maintaining a
minimum water level of six feet and managing a thirty-three-
foot drop in elevation.10 While six of the dams were built
quickly,withintherst ve years, the constructionplanned
for the last site at Pontoise was more complex. Structures were
built on either side of the Île Saint-Martin and the engineer’s
plan for the site shows how they bracketed the island (Figure
4). Work began rst on the masonry weir, which was built
on the Pontoise side. Its chevon shape helped to direct the
path of the water, which is clearly visible in a late nineteenth–
century postcard of the site (Figure 5). Downriver, on the
Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône side of the island, a trio of structures
comprisingalock,axeddam,andasluicegate(anothertool
forcontrollingthe owofwater)were erected.11 Due to the
complexityofthesestructures,andtoaseriesofnancialand
administrativecomplications,completionofthisnalsection
of the canalization was delayed until 1843.12
Fluid Naturalism: Daubigny on the Oise
Oneofthebeneciariesofthisnowmorenavigableriver
was the Barbizon painter Charles-François Daubigny. In 1857,
8 Other methods of water control were used as well, to a lesser extent. For a
discussion of all the various techniques available to French engineers in the
nineteenth century, see Charles Talansier, “Travaux publics, La canalisation
deseuves,Butetuntilité,historique,laSeine,”Le génie civil, serialized arti-
cle (Nov. 3, 10, and 17, 1889).
9 François Beaudouin, «La canalisation de la Seine par barrages mobiles
éclusés au XIXe siècle,» Bulletin de l’Association des Amis du Musée de la
Batellerie 2 (Dec.1988), 3–6; and Leveson Francis Vernon-Harcourt, Treatise
on Rivers and Canals, Relating to the Control and Improvement of Rivers and
the Design, Construction and Development of Canals, vol. 1: Text (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1882), 39–40.
10 Legout, «Histoire de la canalisation,” 187. The navigable depth was in-
creased from 1.8 to 2 meters in 1850 and then to 2.2 meters in 1880, which
allowed even heavier, three-hundred-ton barges to pass.
11 On the engineer’s plan for the placement of the structures at the Île
Saint-Martin, the dam is labeled deversoir like the weir on the upstream
side.Thisisperhapsbecausethestructurewasaxeddamratherthan
moveable one. In other archival documents, the structure accompanying
the lock is referred to as a barrage, or dam, see Préfecture du Département
de Seine-et-Oise, Ouvrages à exécuter pour la construction d’une écluse et
d’un barrage dans la rivière d’Oise, auprès de Pontoise, April 4,1834, Box
3S1 32, Archives Départementales du Val d’Oise, Pontoise, France.
12 Legout, «Histoire de la canalisation,” 187–93; and Bernard Le Sueur,
«Navigations d’Oise,» Annales historiques compiégnoises: Études picardes
modernes et contemporaines 16, no. 55–56 (Winter 1993/94), 50–53. Other
projects were completed at Pontoise, and elsewhere along the river, in the
decades that followed this initial canalization project to accommodate the
need for ever-larger, barges carrying heavier loads.
oritsinuenceon,thelandscapeisrarelydiscussed.Camille
Pissarro’s depictions of the Oise River offer a rich entry point
to consider how these interventions radically altered the
nature of these waterways and how the changed environment
was approached by artists, which is to say, the ecocritical
possibilities afforded by these images. I place Pissarro’s
pictures within the context of the infrastructure projects
executed along the river and in dialogue with the naturalist
approach of Charles-François Daubigny to this same river.
This environmentally-oriented framework brings into focus
how Pissarro’s work registered the river as no longer a purely
natural space, but rather one of human intervention, where
the organic forces of nature are entangled with human, and
civil engineers in particular, desire for control.
Canalization of the Oise (1827–1843)
Like the Seine, the Oise River (Figure 3) was an
important waterway for the transportation of goods in the
nineteenth century. Even though villages like Pontoise were
just a quick one-hour train ride from Paris as early as 1847, the
river remained the preferred method of transport.5 It spans a
little over two hundred miles from its source near the Belgian
city of Chimay to where it joins the Seine at Andrésy. Barges
brought hundreds of tons of foodstuffs and products—like
cerealgrains,wood,coal,andleather—fromthevalleyofthe
Oise to Paris.6
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the river’s
characteristics also made the reliable transportation of these
goodsincreasinglydifcult.Whileitbenetedfromasteady
owofwater,theOisetypicallyhadashallowdepth,arapid
current, sections with high shoals, and intermittent towing
paths. Islands and old bridges with low arches presented
further hindrances to navigation. All these factors made
journeysdownrivertotheconuencewiththeSeineperilous
and trips upriver arduous. Seasonal variations brought further
challenges: with alternating periods of low water and high
oodwaters,orblockagesduetoiceows,navigationonthe
river was only possible for around half of the year.7
To overcome these challenges the Oise was canalized, a
method of river management that aims to improve navigation
byregulatingtheowofwater.Innineteenth-centuryFrance,
this was primarily achieved with a pair of structures—a
barrage,ordam,(eitherxedormoveable)tocontrolthelevel
of the water and an écluse, or lock, to provide passage for
5 Paul Dupont, Le guide des chemins de fer et des bateaux à vapeur et de
toutes les voies de communication de France et de l’étranger, 2nd ed. (Paris:
Librairie administrative et des chemins de fer de Paul Dupont, 1847), 4. During
this period the “Pontoise” station was located at Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône. It was
not until a new cast-iron bridge was built over the Oise, in 1863, that rail
service arrived in Pontoise itself, see Richard R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise:
The Painter in a Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 20; and
Adolphe Laurent Joanne, Les environs de Paris illustrés (Paris: L. Hachette et
cie, 1868), 265.
6 Joanne, Les environs de Paris, 268.
7 Claude Legout, «Histoire de la canalisation de l’Oise de 1830 à nos jours: De
L’Isle-Adam à Andrésy,» Mémoires de la société historique et archéologique
de Pontoise, du Val-d’Oise et du Vexin 94 (2012), 176.

157
PISSARRO AT PONTOISE: PICTURING INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CHANGING RIVERINE ENVIRONMENT
“the realism, —excuse me, —the nature of Mr. Daubigny
is charming and pleases everyone…[his] pure image of the
rustic world delights the eye at the same time that it calms
theoverworkedimagination,simpliesthedream,andgives
the soul a chaste interior peace which delivers it from the
annoyances of our active life.”16 Casting Daubigny’s approach
to nature instead as one of a disinterested observer, Théophile
Gautier suggested in his review that “He does not choose, he
does not compose, he neither adds nor subtracts, he does not
mixhispersonalfeelingswiththereproductionofthesite…
his paintings are pieces of nature cut out and set into a golden
frame.”17
Gautier’s hyperbolic statement reveals his excitement
towelcomethisnewrevolutioninFrenchpainting—onethat
unseated the emotional intensity and extremes of nature of the
Romantics, with a direct observation of nature that elevated
landscape to new prominence. For his river views, however,
Daubigny of course chose and composed his scenes. In his
view of the Oise at the National Gallery of Art in London (Figure
7), for example, we can clearly see evidence of alterations the
artist made to the composition.18 Here thin strips of riverbank
bracket the wide expanse of the river. On the right, a raft of
waterlilies, a well-known feature of the river around Auvers,
invites the viewer into the picture and to a washerwoman who
dips a cloth into the water.19 Likely begun en plein air on his
studio boat, Daubigny later reworked the composition back
in his landbound studio. He extensively altered the right bank
of the river, moving it, the tree, and the washerwoman further
16 Zacharie Astruc, Les 14 stations du Salon Août 1859 (Paris: Poulet Malassis
et Debroise, 1859), 303: “Leréalisme,—pardon,—lanaturedeM.Daubigny
est charmante et plaît à tous. Cette image pure du monde rustique en même
tempsqu’ellecharmelesyeux,reposel’imaginationexaltée,simplielerêve
et donne à l’âme une chaste paix intérieure qui la délivre des importunités de
notre vie active.” SpeakingspecicallyaboutoneofDaubigny’ssubmissions
tothisSalon(p.306)—The Banks of the Oise (1859; Musée des Beaux-Arts
deBordeaux)—Astructhoughtitshowedpromisebutthattheartisthadyetto
realize his full talent: “On y constate les défaillances du talent de M. Daubigny
qui n’est pas encore sûr de ses effets et tâtonne par défaut d’organisation
précise.” (One observes there the failure of Mr. Daubigny’s talent, who is not
yet sure of his effects and by default gropes for precise organization.)
17 Théophile Gautier, “Salon de 1859,” Exposition de 1859, eds. Wolfgang
Drost and Ulrike Henninges (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag,
1992), 192: “Il ne choisit pas, il ne compose pas, il n’ajoute ni n’élague, il
nemêlepassonsentimentpersonnelàlareproductiondusite…sestableaux
sont des morceaux de nature coupés et entourés d’un cadre d’or.”
18 This example is far from unique in the artist’s career. As René Boitelle has
noted in his study of the artist’s later painting techniques, Daubigny often
made signicant changes to a composition or in some cases completely
paintedoverprevious,unnishedpictures.SeeBoitelle,“‘Tout dans son talent
est prime-sautier, sain, ouvert:’ Observations on Daubigny’s Late Painting
Techniques,” in Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape, eds.
Lynne Ambrosini, Frances Fowle and Maite van Dijk (Cincinnati: Taft Museum
of Art, 2016), 131–151.
19 In an article on the artist, the writer Charles Yriarte described the features
of the Oise and the waterlilies in particular: « …et de grandes nappes de
nénufars font des premiers plans charmants à ces tableaux tout faits et
devantlesquelslepeintren’aqu’às’asseoir,laparasolchéenterre,laboite
à couleurs sur les genoux.» (a great blanket of water-lilies make charming
foregrounds to these ready-made pictures and in front of which the painter
has only to sit down, with his umbrella stuck in the ground and his box of
colors on his knees). Yriarte, “Courrier de Paris,” Le monde illustré (June 27,
1868), 403.
the artist famously purchased a boat that he transformed into a
oatingstudio.WorkingfromhisLe Bottin, Daubigny painted
hisprimarysubject—viewsofrurallifeandnaturealongthe
Oise River around his home in Auvers—so frequently that
his name became synonymous with the waterway. The artist
also piloted Le Bottin along other tributaries, and on the Seine
itself, during his many summer painting campaigns.13 On
one such trip, the riverside village of Glouton, with its chain-
operated ferry, caught his attention (Figure 6). Working from
his studio-boat afforded Daubigny a low vantage point that
immersed him in the river’s environment, such that the Seine
llstheforeground,stretchespastthevillage,andoffintothe
distance.Alongthebank,theat-bottomferryrestsawaiting
the cattle that are being coaxed onboard. While there is no
suggestionhereofindustrializationortheuvialinterventions
of civil engineers, it is worth remembering that to even reach
this spot on the Seine from his home at Auvers, Daubigny
would have navigated through the recently completed lock at
Pontoise and two others on the Seine.14
The structures regulating the Oise and the Seine go
unrecognized in Daubigny’s many riverine landscapes.
Indeed, like his bucolic view of Glouton, his river paintings
are instead characterized by a sort of uid, longue durée
naturalism; a tranquil vision of the natural world, untouched
by industrialization, that was increasingly sought after by a
steady stream of buyers wanting to escape the bustle of urban
life.15 The critic Zacharie Astruc calls attention to this aspect
of the artist’s work in his 1859 Salon review, remarking that
13 See Robert Hellebranth, Charles-François Daubigny, 1817–1878 (Morges:
Editions Matute, 1976), xi–xiii, for a chronology of Daubigny’s many trips
along the Seine and its tributaries. His summer sojourns included trips along
the Marne in 1864 and the Yonne in 1874.
14 On the Seine, Daubigny would have travelled through locks at Denouval
and at Meulan on his way to Glouton. See Auguste Boulé, “Le barrage de
Suresnes et la canalisation de la Seine entre Paris et Rouen,” Congrés
international de l’utilisation des eaux uviales, 22–27 juillet 1889 (Paris:
Librairie Polytechnique, Beaudry et Cie, 1889), 21–22; and Edward Thorpe,
The Seine: From Havre to Paris (London: Macmillan and Co., 1913), 19–20.
15 Lynne Ambrosini, “The Market for Daubigny’s Landscapes, or ‘The
best pictures do not sell’,” in Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions
of Landscape, eds. Lynne Ambrosini, Frances Fowle and Maite van Dijk
(Cincinnati: Taft Museum of Art, 2016), 81–92. For a study of the market
for landscape painting in the mid-nineteenth century more generally, see
Nicholas Green, “Dealing in Temperaments: Economic Transformation of the
Artistic Field in France during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Art
History 10, no. 1 (March 1987): 59–78. Maura Coughlin has pointed to a
similar phenomenon in naturalists’ approaches to the French coastline in
the mid-nineteenth century, when shing villages were being overrun by
tourists and turned into seaside resorts. In Coughlin’s estimation, these works
tend to resort to “the patronizing, nostalgic and unproductive language of
primitivism,” see Coughlin, “Shifting Baselines, or Reading Art through Fish,”
in Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual
Culture, eds. Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart (New York, NY: Routledge,
2020), 145–157.

158
GENEVIEVE WESTERBYATHANOR XXXIX
inspiration. The artist’s earliest experiments with river
landscapes coincided with a growing distance between
himself and his teacher and mentor, Camille Corot. His view
of the Marne at Chennevières (1864/65; Scottish National
Gallery), for example, is composed in a manner seemingly
to evoke, and therefore please, Daubigny.23 The elder painter
was on the Salon jury at the time and was an active advocate
for such vanguard landscape painters. He advocated for the
acceptance of Pissarro’s picture of the Marne to the 1865
Salon and the following year successfully campaigned again
on Pissarro’s behalf, over the objections of Corot.24 That same
year, 1866, Pissarro moved to Pontoise, no doubt to be close
to his new champion and to the picturesque river views
Daubigny had made so famous.
Pissarro’s time in Pontoise was one of the most productive
and pictorially diverse of his career. During the roughly twelve
years he spent there, he produced around 300 paintings,
along with countless drawings, pastels, and prints.25 In his
study of Pissarro’s time in Pontoise, Richard Brettell suggests
that we should understand the artist’s approach to his choice
of subjects as one of a “visual historian,” painting everything
from aspects of traditional rural life and activity on the river
to the contrasting economies of agriculture and industrial
factories.26 However, we should not take this to mean that the
artist was indiscriminate. Indeed, while Pissarro’s attention
extended to the relatively new railway bridge, it seems that he
didnotndthetrainstation,whichwasinauguratedin1870,
worthy of his visual record.27
Pissarrodidndinspirationinthemodernizedriverine
environment around the lock, dam, and weir bracketing the Île
Saint-Martin, depicting them in a trio of pictures.28 The artist
rstapproachedthesubjectoftheweir in1868(Figure10).
Standing on the riverbank on the Pontoise side, he focused on
thespotwheretheOisesplitsintotwo armstoowaround
the island. In the background, barges clog the waterway on
23 His extensive use of a palette knife further reveals his interest in the work
ofGustaveCourbet.OntheinuencebothartistshadonPissarroseeKermit
Swiler Champa, Studies in Early Impressionism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1973), 70–71.
24 See Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical
Catalogue of Paintings, with Alexia de Buffévent and Annie Champié, trans.
Mark Hutchinson and Michael Taylor, vol. 1 (Paris: Wildenstein Institute Pub-
lications, 2005), 118, 121.
25 Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, “Pontoise: 1866–1869, 1872–1882,” in
Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings,
vol. 2, p. 97.
26 Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise, 158–59.
27 For Pissarro’s depiction of the newly constructed railway bridge, see
Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise, 67. This exclusion of the train station is notable
because the artist painted other new buildings in and around Pontoise, like
the Châlon factory that opened in 1872. Also, later in his career, the exterior
of the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris featured in a series of painting, see Richard
R. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s
Series Paintings, ed. Mary Anne Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992), 51–59.
28 The weir on the Pontoise side is also visible in a sweeping view of river by
theartist— Banks of the Oise at Pontoise (1872; Private collection, Chicago).
In that case, river infrastructure is less the primary subject of the picture than
one of the many effects of the industrializing of Pontoise.
to the right. Due to an unfortunate early overcleaning of the
painting, we can see these changes with our naked eye (Figure
8).20Theeshtoneofthewasherwomanandtheblueofher
cloth can be seen further to the left as can the original tree,
still visible through the lighter paint of the sky.
Daubigny often used his oil sketches as a reference for
pictures that were worked later entirely in his studio, like for the
view of the Oise he exhibited at the Salon of 1863 (Figure 9).
Rather than washerwomen working, here local villagers relax
on the riverbank, their bright red and yellow hats stand out
against the lush green surroundings. In this case, a Salon critic
suggested that the artist was more concerned with pleasing his
collectors than with forwarding the agenda of naturalism. He
lamentedthatinDaubigny’sbetterpicturesonendsanartist
who “goes straight to the simple, to the broad, and achieves
greatness by a sobriety of means,” whereas in this picture there
is “another Daubigny that the crowd understands more easily
and likes better: the one who makes a considerable number
of the Banks of the Oise in a soft grey tone, or else small
appealing farms, with pleasant clusters of trees. That painter,
weleavetothedealersoftherueLaftte…”21
Whether aiming to please his collectors or his own
artistic eye, Daubigny was participating in the construction of
a certain kind of landscape. More than “pieces of nature cut
out and set into a golden frame,” his river landscapes present
the ction of a natural world and rural life that remained
untouched by modernity, what Nicholas Green has termed
a “spectacle of nature,” to be consumed visually by the
Parisian bourgeoise.22 To achieve this, Daubigny’s editing eye
not only selected subjects that avoided evidence of the rapid
industrialization underway along the rivers he explored in his
Le Bottin, he also underplayed how infrastructure projects had
changed the nature of the river itself. Nevertheless, even before
the artist decided to move the riverbank in his oil sketch, the
interventions made by river engineers had already changed
thewaterway’swidth,depth,andspeedtobenethumanity’s
needs.
Pissarro’s River: Infrastructure and Impressions of Nature
It was in Daubigny’s views of the Oise, like the one
he showed at the 1863 Salon, that Camille Pissarro found
20 Larry Keith and Raymond White, “Mixed Media in the Work of Charles-
François Daubigny,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 23 (2002), 46–47.
The authors are careful to note that the overcleaning occurred before the pic-
ture was bequeathed to the museum in 1928.
21 Jules-Antoine Castagnary, Salons: 1857–1870, vol. 1 (Paris: Biblio-
thèque-Charpentier,1892),145:“…allant droit au simple, au large, et attei-
gnantlagrandeurparlasobriétédesmoyens…Ilenestunautrequelafoule
comprend plus aisément et aime davantage ; qui a fait dans un ton doux et
gris un nombre considérable de bords de l’Oise, ou bien de petites fermes
séduisantes, avec des bouquets d’arbres agréables. Celui-là, nous le laissons
auxmarchandsdelarueLaftte,n’est-cepas,maître?” See also Ambrosini,
“The Market for Daubigny’s Landscapes,” 90.
22 Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois
Culture in Nineteenth Century France (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1995). For Green (p. 3), “nature” is not a pre-existing given, but should
ratherbeunderstoodas“asocialandculturalconstructspecictoaparticular
material situation.”

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PISSARRO AT PONTOISE: PICTURING INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CHANGING RIVERINE ENVIRONMENT
wall of the lock. Here the river curves around the island and
Pissarro’s clever choice of framing results in the straightening
of the otherwise diagonal dam to create a strong horizontal
in the foreground. With this frontal perspective, the artist was
able to render the water as it rushed through the dam, its
armature still visible at the top, and the resulting frothy-white
rapids below.
ItisdifculttoknowPissarro’sintentionforundertaking
these subjects. The pictures clearly exemplify his shifting
artistic approach away from the muted colors of the Barbizon
towards the brighter palette and broken brushwork that would
later be the hallmarks of the Impressionists. With his selection
of site, Pissarro arguably aligns the river itself with other
signsofmodernity—likeriversidefactoriesandnewrailroad
bridges—thatwereequallyapartofthe“visualhistory”ofhis
time in Pontoise. Perhaps he thought such subjects would be
appealing to his new art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, and to his
growing number of supporters, who were seeking a different
perspective on nature than the one Daubigny was presenting
for his collectors.30 Can we also read an ecological message
in these works?
Stephen Eisenman has suggested this as an approach
for understanding Pissarro’s Cart with Logs (1862/63; Hecht
Museum, Haifa)— an early oil sketch that depicts workers
loading the thin, straight trunks of pine trees onto a horse-
drawn cart. For Eisenman, the sketch reveals the artist’s
concern with the widespread disappearance of oak trees
from the forest of Fontainebleau in favor of this fast-growing
construction material.31 He argues that while Pissarro was
not a prominent voice in the campaign to save the forest,
like Théodore Rousseau, concern over the deforestation was
widespread among the Barbizon group.32
In Pissarro’s trio of pictures of the weir and dam bracketing
the Île Saint-Martin, I think it is possible to approach the works
with what Andrew Patrizio has called an “ecological eye,”
30 Bord de l’Oise à Pontoise (1872; Private collection, Chicago), for ex-
ample, was bought almost immediately by Durand-Ruel on November 12,
1872,whothenquicklysoldittotheinuentialImpressionistcollectorÉrnest
Hoschedé on April 28, 1873, see Anne Distel, “Some Pissarro Collectors in
1874,” in Studies on Camille Pissarro, ed. Christopher Lloyd (London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 71–72n60. Pissarro meet Durand-Ruel in London
wheretheybothed during the Franco-Prussianwar.Pissarrosoldatleast
four pictures to his new dealer while he was there, see John Zarobell, “Du-
rand-Ruel and the Market for Modern Art, from 1870–1873,” in Discovering
the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting, ed. Sylvie Patry
(London: National Gallery Company, 2015), 87–88.
31 Stephen Eisenman, “From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism,”
in From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism, ed. Stephen Eisenman
(Milano: Skira, 2010), 24.
32 Rousseau petitioned Emperor Napoleon III in 1852 to establish a nature
preserve in the forest, which was later achieved in 1861. On Rousseau and
the deforestation of Fontainebleau, see Greg M. Thomas, Art and Ecology
in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Eisenman also suggests that
Pissarro may have been familiar with the work of contemporary geographer
and social ecologist (and fellow anarchist) Elisée Reclus, Eisenman, “From
Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism,”, 20.
the upriver side of the lock. Tufted, dark-green trees line the
path that leads to the village of Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône in
the background, which disappears behind the tree-covered
island.Theother arm ofthe riverlls the foreground.Here
the blue, gray, and green of the relatively calm water shifts to
aurryofwhiteandcreamasitrushesovertheweir.Thanks
to its chevron shape, and our perspective, as the weir extends
towards us, only a dark line of its upper most ridge is visible
creating a strong diagonal that mirrors that of the receding
village in the background.
Pissarro returned to the subject several years later, in
1872, when he settled again in Pontoise following a stay in
London during the Franco-Prussian war (Figure 1). Compared
with his earlier attempt, Pissarro employed a brighter palette
and a looser handling for his second version. With short
brushstrokes of luminous whites, greys, and blues, he was able
to convey more vividly the impression of shimmering light
onthewater’ssurface.Pissarroalsomadesignicantchanges
to the compositional layout. He raised the lower edge of the
foreground, lowered the horizon line, and generally extended
the scene across a wider canvas, which, together with the
strong horizontal geometry of the composition, offers a more
panoramic view. A consequence of this new framing is that
the weir in the foreground is far less readable.29 The strong
diagonal of the underlying masonry structure was truncated to
a strange and seemingly disconnected thick dark line. What
does carry over is the weir’s turbulent effect on the water,
which remains a key focus in both versions.
The third picture features the dam and lock on the
Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône side (Figure 11). Standing again on the
opposite bank, Pissarro experimented with a dynamic new
composition. In the middle ground, barges laden with goods
congest the upriver side of the lock. On the far right, another
can be seen either entering or exiting the lock itself, the barge’s
ag-toppedmastisvisibleextendingupwardbehindthestone
29 This formal discission is perhaps in part what led to the confusion in the
early twentieth century about how to title the work. It was not exhibited in
the artist’s lifetime and whether this was one of the pictures bought by the
art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1872 is not certain. It was sold in 1900 with
the title Les Chalands au bord de la rivière (The Barges by the River), see
Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, Tableaux modernes, pastels, aquarelles, dessins
(Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, June 11, 1900), p. 60–61, lot no. 60. Today, the
Cleveland Museum of Art uses the title The Lock at Pontoise, one given by
the1939catalogueraisonnéthatincorrectlyidentiesthisview.Themost
recent, 2005 catalogue raisonné corrects this error and instead uses the title
Le Déversoir de Pontoise (The Weir at Pontoise), see Pissarro and Durand-Ruel
Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, vol. 2, p. 199, no. 243.

160
GENEVIEVE WESTERBYATHANOR XXXIX
Returning then to Pissarro’s pictures of the public works
bracketing the Île Saint-Martin, whether his interest in these
subjects was purely formal, whether he thought they might
strike a particular chord with his new dealer and growing group
of followers, or whether he aimed to communicate a deeper
ecological message, what is clear is that where Daubigny
suppressed evidence of the river as an anthropogenic space,
Pissarro confronted it. Approaching his depictions of the river
infrastructure at Pontoise with an environmentally-oriented
framework allows us to move beyond Pissarro’s rendering of
theephemeraleffectsoflightreectedonthewater’ssurface
to acknowledge how the canalization campaign altered the
Oise River. Like Lantier in Zola’s novel, Pissarro recognized
how canalization was changing the Oise. His rendering of
the turbulent, white-frothy water that these structures created,
with animated brushwork and pure unmixed paint, literally
foregrounds the interventions made by engineers who were
trying to control the river by remaking it.
University of Delaware
or with an environmental reorientation.33 As we have seen,
thecanalizationofthe Oise signicantly altered thenatural
state of the river. With Pissarro’s focus on these elements of
river infrastructure, he countered Daubigny’s longue durée,
geological view of the river, by stressing the impact the
projects had on the environment and how engineers were
exploiting this natural resource.34 In so doing, he offered an
alternate view of the river, shifting it to the human timescale
of immediacy and quotidian events, what French historian
Fernand Braudel has termed the événements.35
As an environmental record of how these projects
changed the nature of the river— to one that was more
predictable,regulated,andnavigable—Pissarro’ssubjectwas
almostaseetingastheeffectsoflighthexedtocanvas.The
benets to navigation that the initial canalization produced
were themselves relatively short-lived. The growing amount of
trafcontheriverwassoonmorethanthelockscouldhandle,
leading to the kind of congestion we can see in Pissarro’s
pictures. To address this issue, a new lateral canal with an
additional, larger lock (a grande écluse) was constructed in
the 1890s.36 This was followed by the demolition of the weir
and a large section of the Île Saint-Martin to make way for a
newerandmoreefcientstyleofdamthatwascompletedin
1913. A general plan for this project (Figure 12) shows in a
faint gray outline the weir and shape of the island as Pissarro
would have seen it, along with the placement of the proposed
dam, and the outline of a smaller, more streamlined version of
the island. Due to the required reshaping of the island, these
projects were executed much to the dismay of the residents.
Numerous objections to the project were noted during a
public comment period, including one letter in which the
author claimed that “It is worth remember that the Île Saint
Martin has one of the most beautiful thickets of trees and
greenery on the Oise River.”37
33 Andrew Patrizio, The Ecological Eye: Assembling an Ecocritical Art
History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). My approach to
Pissarro’swork is equally inuenced by Maura Coughlin who has looked
to art depicting the nineteenth-century French Atlantic coastline for their
“ecocritical possibilities,” see, for example, Coughlin, “Shifting Baselines, or
Reading Art through Fish,” 145–157.
34 The longue durée, and related concepts like geologic or natural time, are
often mentioned in discussions of landscapes by Barbizon and Impressionist
artists.StephenEisenman, forexample,nds inPissarro’swork“conicting
measuresoftimeandmodesofproduction…thelongue durée of geography
and geology (erosion, the course of rivers, the creation and exhaustion of the
soil) versus the brief and halting time of human intercourse (the length of a
conversation of a walk from farm to market) [or] the hurry-up time of indus-
try…”seeEisenman,“FromCorottoMonet:TheEcologyofImpressionism,”
17–18.
35 For these frameworks for the analysis of history, see Fernand Braudel, “La
longue durée,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 13, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec.
1958), 725–53, who sets out a three-tiered conception of historical time
comprising the longue durée, conjuncture (a middle term of decades), and
événements.
36 There were seven new grandes écluses in all, each placed in new diversion
(or “lateral”) canals dug alongside the existing infrastructure, Legout, «His-
toire de la canalisation,” 188–89.
37 Letter from the Société historique du Vexin, June 12, 1907, Archives mu-
nicipals, Ville de Pontoise, 3O 3: “Il est bon de rappeler que l’ile St. Martin
est l’un des plus beaux massifs d’arbres et de verdure de la rivière d’Oise.”

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PISSARRO AT PONTOISE: PICTURING INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CHANGING RIVERINE ENVIRONMENT
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Figure 1. Camille Pissarro, The Weir at Pontoise, 1872, oil on fabric, 53 x 83 cm (20 7/8 x 32 11/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr.
Fund, 1990.7.
Figure 2. Gustave Caillebotte, Fishermen on the
Seine, 1888, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Private
collection.

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Figure 3. Raoul Vuillaume, Carte du cours de l’Oise (Map of the course of the Oise River). Paris: Bureaux du “Yacht,” 1887. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque
nationale de France.

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PISSARRO AT PONTOISE: PICTURING INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CHANGING RIVERINE ENVIRONMENT
Figure 4. Plan for the placement of the lock and dam at Pontoise, 1834–35. Archives départementales du Val-d’Oise, 3S1 32(4).
Figure 5. A late nineteenth-century postcard showing the weir on the Pontoise side of the Île Saint-Martin. Courtesy of the author.

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Figure 6. Charles-François Daubigny, River Scene, 1859. Oil on panel, 36.2 x 65.4 cm (14 1/4 x 25 3/4 in.). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William H.
Herriman, 21.134.
Figure 7. Charles-François Daubigny, View on the Oise, 1873, oil on wood, 38.8 x 67 cm. National Gallery of Art, London, NG6323.

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PISSARRO AT PONTOISE: PICTURING INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CHANGING RIVERINE ENVIRONMENT
Figure 8. Details of Daubigny’s View on the Oise (1873) showing changes the artist made to the placement of the washerwoman and the tree on the right bank.
Figure 9. Charles-François Daubigny, Banks of the Oise Auvers, 1863, oil on canvas, 88.9 x 161.3 cm. St. Louis Art Museum, 84:2007.

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Figure 10. Camille Pissarro, The Weir at Pontoise, c. 1868, oil on canvas, 58.5 x 72 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

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Figure 11. Camille Pissarro, The Dam and the Lock at Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, 1872, oil on canvas, 38.1 x 54.6 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of Artefact/
Alamy Stock Photo.
PISSARRO AT PONTOISE: PICTURING INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CHANGING RIVERINE ENVIRONMENT

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Figure 12. General plan for the construction of a mobile dam at Pontoise (detail), 1906. Archives départementales du Val-d’Oise, 3S1 37.
GENEVIEVE WESTERBYATHANOR XXXIX

ATHANOR XXXIX
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY
COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS