Landscape at Eragny

In 1892 the house at Éragny that Pissarro had rented since 1884 came up for sale, and Claude Monet, who lived a few miles away at Giverny, lent him 15,000 francs to buy it. The following year Pissarro turned the barn in the garden into a studio. Here he looks across a meadow at the village itself. The museum dates the canvas 1897, although the year beside the signature at the lower right reads 95. Cows graze in the foreground with a figure walking among them, and behind a line of trees rise the steep roofs of a farm and the thin spire of the church. A pale sun hangs low in a pink and violet sky. Trees and cows throw long shadows across the grass.