Bourgeois House at L'Hermitage, Pontoise, 1873 by Camille Pissarro

While there is little surprising about the composition of Bourgeois House at L'Hermitage, Pontoise, the handling of the paint is best described as exploratory. The short, crisp brushstrokes of pure colour adopted by Pissarro during the early 1870s are now substituted by a looser, fussier manner of working that has its logical conclusion in the canvases dating from the late 1870s. The same tendency can be found in other works during early 1870s. In these pictures, as in the Bourgeois House at L'Hermitage, Pontoise, compositional unity is no longer wholly dependent upon the drawing so much as on the overlaying of the paint surface and the tonal qualities derived from a more unified palette. These features are also characteristic of Pissarro's paintings executed in the paintings of Cezanne during the mid-i870s