Haymakers, Evening, Eragny

Pissarro painted these haymakers in 1893 at Éragny, his village on the river Epte, in a year when France was turning hard against anarchists. In December a bomb was thrown into the Chamber of Deputies, and parliament answered with the first of a set of repressive laws. Pissarro himself read the radical geographer Élisée Reclus and the Russian prince Peter Kropotkin, and his fields show village work as something shared. Here young women gather hay in the evening light, one carrying a great bundle on her back, another leaning into a long rake that cuts across the canvas.

In February 1894 the Paris gallery Durand-Ruel bought it straight from the artist. That June an Italian anarchist stabbed President Sadi Carnot in Lyon, and the painter, a known sympathiser, left for Belgium. By September the picture belonged to the Chicago collector Martin A. Ryerson.