Autumn in the Meadow at Éragny

Pissarro settled in the village of Eragny, north-west of Paris, in 1884, and bought the house eight years later with money lent to him by Monet. A recurring infection in his tear duct made it painful to work outdoors in wind or cold, so he had a studio put up at the end of the garden with a window facing the meadow. Nearly everything he painted at Eragny after that was painted through glass, this canvas of 1899 included, when he was in his late sixties. The touch is very broken here, small separated strokes of colour set side by side, close to the divided method he had taken up in the 1880s and then largely given up. The picture went to Baden in Switzerland, to Sidney Brown and his wife, who began buying Impressionists in 1896. Their villa opened as a museum in 1990.