Peasant Girl Raking Hay at Èragny

By 1889 Camille Pissarro was nearly 60, the oldest of the Impressionists, and he had spent the past few years doing something his younger friends had started. After meeting Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in 1885, he took up their painstaking method of building a picture from countless small, separate strokes of pure colour, a slow and almost scientific way of working. Here he turns that laboratory technique on the plainest of subjects, a peasant girl raking hay in the fields behind his house at Éragny, where he had settled in 1884. The patience of the method and the patience of the labour seem to answer each other. Around 1890 he gave the method up, saying its slowness had drained the spontaneity out of his hand.