Apple Trees at Éragny, Autumn

1892 was the year Pissarro's luck finally turned, and this orchard sits right at the centre of it. That January a large show of his work at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris did well, with critics and buyers alike. And in July he was at last able to buy the house at Éragny his family had been renting for eight years, using a loan of 15,000 francs from his old friend Monet, who lived nearby at Giverny. It sat oddly with him. He was a committed anarchist, uneasy about owning property at all, and uneasier still about owing the money to a friend. The apple trees here grew on the ground he had just bought. By this date he had set aside the painstaking dot-by-dot technique he had tried a few years earlier and gone back to the looser, quicker touch you see in these autumn leaves.