Piette was Pissarro’s closest friend and a core member of the Pontoise school of painting: he lived and worked in Pontoise, becoming an important figure in the local art community. To this day, a street in Pontoise bears his name (Rue Ludovic Piette), recognising his deep connection to this place.

Their profound friendship led Pissarro to paint a portrait of his friend, Portrait of the Painter Ludovic Piette in a Round Hat. This painting, like the first Impressionist exhibition held in the same year, played a crucial role in the history of Impressionism—uniting the group, resisting outside criticism, and strengthening the artists’ convictions.

The painting employs the Impressionist hallmark of loose brushwork and luminous colours. Piette captures the vitality of the market through a sense of movement in his brushstrokes and vibrant hues, rather than pursuing precise, detailed realism.

At the centre of the composition stands the town hall (Mairie) of Pontoise, with its clean lines, representing the public heart of the small town. On the right side, crowds and market stalls gather, full of everyday liveliness. Piette skilfully uses street perspective and light‑and‑shadow contrasts to lead the viewer’s eye towards the distant streetscape.

The brushwork is free and textural, quintessentially Impressionist. Through a rich palette, he captures fleeting changes of light—the bright, sunlit areas standing in sharp contrast to the shadows cast by buildings. The painting vividly documents daily life in a late‑19th‑century French town, a distinctly modern viewpoint at the time, fully aligned with Impressionism’s core mission of depicting contemporary life.

Recommended by Pissarro, Piette took part in the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, where he showed thirty‑one works and became one of the exhibition’s “honoured guests.”

Another large‑format work by Piette on a similar subject, painted in 1876, The Market outside Pontoise Town Hall (111 x 186 cm), is now in the collection of the Musée Pissarro in Pontoise.