Bountiful Harvest

In 1892 Camille Pissarro, an anarchist who objected to owning property on principle, became a landowner. The family bought the house they had rented for years at Éragny, a village on the river Epte northwest of Paris, with 15,000 francs lent by Claude Monet. This canvas, signed and dated 1893, comes from the fields around that house. Haycocks stand in rows between the trees, a woman works among them, and a man crosses the meadow behind her. In older landscapes a shepherd often sat in a corner to give the view a scale. Here, as the Israel Museum points out, the people doing the work hold the centre of the picture. How far Pissarro really shared the peasants' lot is still argued, and the historian Richard Brettell has questioned the familiar story of his sympathy. The painting came to Jerusalem as a gift from the Sara Lee Corporation.