Sonnenuntergang in Éragny

1890 is roughly the year Pissarro started backing out of the dot. For about five years he had painted in the small separated touches that Seurat and Signac worked out, and he had argued for the method against most of his old Impressionist friends. By the end of the decade he was saying plainly that it was too slow to catch a passing effect of light, and a sunset is nothing except a passing effect of light.

He was 60 and living in a rented farmhouse at Eragny-sur-Epte, about 80 kilometres north-west of Paris, where he had settled in 1884 and where he stayed until he died. Two years after this canvas he bought the place outright with 15,000 francs lent by Monet, who was at Giverny down the same valley.

A chronic eye infection was already limiting how long he could work in the open air.