Landschaft mit Schafherde

Pissarro signed this once in 1889 and again in 1902, and the two signatures sit on rather different paintings. He began it at Éragny-sur-Epte, the village north-west of Paris where he had settled in 1884 and turned a barn into a studio, working from a pastel he had made that year of a shepherd gathering his flock under a heavy sky. More than a decade later, probably for a commission from the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, he went back over the whole canvas, packing the brushwork tighter and thickening the weather. Pissarro was a convinced anarchist, and writers on the picture have read the huddled flock and the coming storm as a statement about rural people holding together. He dated that second signature 1902, the year before he died.