In the vegetable garden

In 1878 Pissarro could barely sell anything. The dealer Durand-Ruel had stopped buying from the Impressionists, their auction prices were humiliating, and the painter was at Pontoise with a growing family. That year a Florentine named Diego Martelli, a critic who had spent time in Paris and knew Degas and Manet, bought this small kitchen-garden canvas from him directly, along with a second one. Two years later Martelli published a pamphlet called Gli Impressionisti, the first serious Italian defence of the group. When he died in 1895 his will left the pictures to the city of Florence, so they belong to the Comune and not to the state. They hung in the Palazzo Vecchio at first and moved here in 1924, when the modern gallery opened on the second floor of Palazzo Pitti.