Late Afternoon in our Meadow

At the last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, Pissarro's new canvases hung in a section of their own beside those of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and his son Lucien, all built from small separate touches of colour. The critic Félix Fénéon came up with a name for them, Neo-Impressionists. This meadow at Eragny, his village north of Paris, is dated the following year. Over a green base the sunlit grass is flecked with pink and yellow. The shade gets blue, mauve and the odd touch of orange. Young trees still stand in protective wooden cages, and the low sun fans their shadows out towards a woman with a basket. Within a year or so he let the method go, finding it slow and stiff. The painting entered the National Gallery in 2020 in lieu of inheritance tax, from the collection of Viscount Astor.