Pissarro painted this tranquil scene soon after joining his friends and fellow Impressionists Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley in the countryside northwest of Paris, where they had recently settled. He arrived at a critical moment in the history of Impressionism, when the influence of the landscape painters of the Barbizon School merged with that of the realist artists Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet to create a style characterized by bold, broken brushwork and shimmering color. A product of this remarkable synthesis of styles, Road to Marly presents Pissarro’s impression of a lazy rural afternoon.
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