Bäuerin beim Graben

Around 1882 Camille Pissarro, then in his early fifties and the oldest of the Impressionists, changed direction. For years he had painted pure landscape, but now he began setting single working figures at the center of large canvases, most of them peasant women in the fields around Pontoise, the town north of Paris where he was living. This digging woman is one of them, and she was among the peasant pictures he showed at the seventh Impressionist exhibition that spring. Some critics complained that he was only imitating the solemn peasant paintings of Jean-François Millet, a charge Pissarro brushed off, saying he simply wanted to show country labor honestly, as he actually saw it. At the end of that same year he left Pontoise, where he had worked for much of the past decade, and moved a few miles off to Osny.