While the surface texture is sensuous, the firm compositional network, Pissarro's hallmark, locks the road, river, field, and sky together tightly.

Factories along the bank played a prominent role, a blatant intrusion of modernity into a landscape contemporaries were still depicting as unspoiled nature.

This particular image downplays the factory compared to others in the sequence, relegating it to the background, but it is still a significant part of this humdrum section of riverbank on a grey, cloudy day.

The variety of treatments he afforded the factory seems to say less about his feelings about that structure in particular than about the purpose of modern painting, which had a duty to incorporate contrasting elements that had traditionally been kept separate.

[3] The Banks of the Oise near Pontoise was purchased with the James E. Roberts Fund by the Herron School of Art in 1940, then remained with the IMA during the split.