The Côte des Bœufs ('cattle ridge') is a steep hill face just north of the River Oise, and just west of the rue de L'Hermitage—the Departmental road passing through the neighbourhood.

The technique of painting kaleidoscopically criss-crossing areas has the effect of attracting the eye and drawing it into the pattern, but the price of achieving this is the apparent submerging of details—such as those of the two people ambling down the hill—beneath impasto and contending colours.

The subdued tonal structure was not achieved by the use of dull earth colours but by mixing pure strong pigments such as ultramarine, vermilion, emerald green and chrome yellow.

With the Montfoucault works of the middle 1870s, Pissarro turned to explore a narrower theme of peasant rurality, and with the wooded sous bois ('undergrowth') landscapes of the late 1870s, this quest for intimacy further constricted and darkened.

[14] The densely treated surface, the extensive use of tone, the fragmented and overlaying strokes, and the theme of buildings seen through a screen of trees are all characteristic of his work at the end of the 1870s, and the abstractly and closely conceived internal rhythms are very remote from the clear air of the earlier pictures.

Among those viewing at the exhibition were the Impressionist apologist Georges Rivière, who described it as 'a large landscape by Pissarro', and the critic Amedée Descubes who remarked on the 'attractive painting, a small house hidden away in the forest, which struck us by the firmness and simplicity of its brushwork'.

[16] Pride of place in the third gallery at the exhibition was given to Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette, and The Côte des Bœufs at L'Hermitage was displayed next to it.

The rude and wintry hillside features, the anonymous peasant figures, and the worked and reworked surface of the Pissarro landscape are in dramatic contrast with the neighbouring Renoir painting's fleeting display of a summertime dance in Paris.

A modern conception of Impressionism frequently puts a premium on the swift or improvised application of paint to the canvas, but this important characteristic is clearly absent in Pissarro's laboriously constructed picture.

[18][19] In 1923 when the painting was in the possession of the Knoedler Gallery (London), the artist Walter Sickert wrote, "The large canvas by Pissarro entitled La Côte des Boeufs, with its beautiful and highly complicated intricacies of design, its solidity of architecture, and a certain human warmth and tenderness, is perhaps as important an example of this insufficiently appreciated painter's work as any that exists.

But the charm of a picture like this lies chiefly in its immense and indefatigable laboriousness, in labour so cunning, so swift and so patient, that the more it is piled up, the greater the clarity and simplicity of the result.