Haystacks, Morning, Éragny

Pissarro settled at Eragny, a village on the Epte northwest of Paris, in 1884, and bought the house eight years later with money lent to him by Monet. He put up a studio there with a wide window onto the garden, and he needed it. A chronic eye infection had made painting outdoors in wind and dust risky for him all through the 1890s, which is why so much of his late work looks out from behind glass. These haystacks stood in the meadow by the house, and he came back to them at different hours to see what each one did to the light. He was in his late sixties when he painted this, and in the same year he was in Paris working on views of the Tuileries gardens from a rented upper room. He died four years later, in 1903.