Musée d’Art et d’Histoire Pissarro-Pontoise (MAHPP)

Opened in 1980 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the painter Camille Pissarro, the Musée Pissarro has been recently renovated and enlarged. It honours this Impressionist master who stayed in Pontoise between 1866 and 1868, and then again between 1872 and 1884. In a smart, substantial home looking down over the old town, on the spot where a royal castle once stood, the museum is surrounded by a garden providing an idyllic view across the Oise Valley towards Auvers-sur-Oise, a place favoured by another great artist, Vincent van Gogh.

A pioneering Impressionist, Camille Pissarro would invite Paul Cézanne, Édouard Béliard and Armand Guillaumin to discover the local area and paint alongside him here, just as his friend Claude Monet would do with fellow artists in Argenteuil. In 1874, Pissarro, while based at Pontoise, helped organise the first-ever Impressionist exhibition.

The museum collections count, first and foremost, works by Camille Pissarro and his five sons, Lucien, Georges (Manzana-Pissarro), Ludovic-Rodo, Félix (Jean-Roch) and Paul-Émile. Alongside etchings, drawings and canvases, some of Camille Pissarro’s prolific correspondence is also on display. On loan from the Musée d’Orsay, La brouette dans un verger, Le Valhermeil takes pride of place in the first room, set above the fireplace.

Also represented are landscape painters from pre- and post-Impressionist movements who painted in the area between the towns of Pontoise and L’Isle-Adam in the second half of the 19^th century, such as Charles-François Daubigny, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Caillebotte, Henri Matisse, Paul Signac, Louis Hayet, Ludovic Piette, William Thornley, Emilio Boggio and Norbert Goeneutte.

Upstairs, the museum regularly puts on temporary exhibitions, the themes centring around Impressionism or the many artists from the Pissarro family, encouraging visitors to return time and again to this lovely little museum.

As well as encouraging you to visit the museum, the town of Pontoise has set up a trail, balades impressionnistes through the Hermitage quarter of town, leading you in the footsteps of Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, who, together, painted no fewer than 500 canvases around this little district of the Oise Valley.