Deux jeunes paysannes causant sous les arbres, Pontoise

By 1881 Pissarro had been painting in and around Pontoise, northwest of Paris, on and off for more than a decade, and something in his work was shifting. For years the countryside itself had been his subject, with people small in the distance. Around this time the peasants step forward. Here two young women have stopped to talk under the trees, close to us and unhurried, the fields and a house behind them almost a backdrop to their conversation. It is an ordinary rural moment given the weight he once saved for a whole hillside. Pissarro was the eldest of the Impressionists and the only one to show in all eight of their group exhibitions, and in these Pontoise years he was thinking hard, partly alongside Degas, about how to build a solid figure out of the same broken, flickering touch he used for leaves and light. Within a year he would leave Pontoise for good.