E ffet de niege à Osny, “La Ferme à Noël” is a superb example of Pissarro’s stylistic experimentation of the early 1880s. The village of Osny is situated on a high plain several miles from the artist’s home in the river valley of Pontoise. Pissarro moved his family into temporary quarters here toward the end of 1882, partly as a stimulus to find fresh subjects and partly out of concern for his family’s health. The reduced emphasis on recession and spatial depth in this work is characteristic of Pissarro’s temptation to move beyond the spontaneous naturalism that had defined his work of the previous decade.

This painting also demonstrates the artist’s increasing fascination with the human figure during this period. “Whereas before they are carefully integrated in surroundings, now the human figure dominates the composition often at the expense of the backgrounds” (Pissarro (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1980, p. 116). Although he moves away from the viewer, the male figure here is central to the composition. Indeed, his position and movement on the snow-covered path provides both a link between the flattened foreground and background and a sense of narrative within the scene. It is no wonder then that among the circle of Impressionists, and in particular at this juncture of his career, Pissarro was often considered the bridge between landscape artists such as Monet and figural artists like Degas.

As for the application of paint itself, Pissarro began to use “small, cross-hatched strokes of separate hues, one over the other, which built up dense webbing of color and texture, like flattened, matted grass” (ibid., p. 158). As a result of this technique, Pissarro has rendered the surface of this canvas with lively impasto. His delicate mixtures of pastel blues, purples and greens conjure the crisp atmosphere of a winter’s day while his short, textured brushwork betray the earliest signs of development of a Neo-Impressionist technique, which would shock the Parisian avant-garde at the Eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition in 1886.

Writing on the occasion of the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, the influential critic J.K. Huymans wrote, “M. Pissarro may now be classed among the number of remarkable and audacious painters we possess. If he can preserve his perceptive, delicate and nimble eye, we shall certainly have in him the most original landscapist of our time.” Such a volte-face was remarkable in view of Huysmans’ previous antipathy toward what he felt were crude techniques and strong colors favored by the Impressionists. As Pissarro dryly commented, “For a while he considered us sick… Little by little he has come to take the position that we are cured” (quoted in Ralph Spikes & Paul Harper, Pissarro, His Life and Work, New York, 1980, p. 151).

The first owner of this painting was Georges de Bellio, a Romanian-born physician who moved to Paris to study medicine in 1850. Endowed with a fortune from his family, de Bellio became one of the first serious collectors of Impressionism and a friend and patron to this then-fledgling group of artists working at the fringes of the Parisian art world. He avidly acquired works not only by Pissarro, but also those of Monet, Renoir, Degas and Sisley, among others; at one point, de Bellio was the owner of Impression, soleil levant, Monet’s 1872 masterpiece widely considered to be the work that gave the movement its name. His daughter, Victornie de Bellio, bequeathed a significant portion of her father’s collection to the Musée Marmottan.