Autumn, Poplars, Éragny

In the summer of 1894 a young Italian anarchist stabbed the French president, Sadi Carnot, and the authorities began rounding up anyone with anarchist ties. Pissarro, who had openly sympathised with the movement for years, packed up and crossed into Belgium, staying near Brussels until October. When he came back to his house at Éragny, a village on the river Epte northwest of Paris, this is the kind of view that was waiting for him: the poplars he had painted in every season, going gold. By then a chronic infection in one tear duct was making it hard for him to work outdoors for long, and more and more he painted the fields around Éragny from a window. This row of trees belongs to a motif he returned to again and again, and beyond it the spire of the neighbouring hamlet of Bazincourt was often just in view.