Peasant Woman Resting at the Foot of a Tree, Effect of Sunshine, Éragny

The summer of 1899 in France was the summer of the Dreyfus retrial at Rennes, and Paris argued about almost nothing else. Pissarro was 69, Jewish and firmly on Dreyfus's side, which had already cost him old friendships with Degas and Renoir. He spent the season where he had lived since 1884, at Éragny, a village about 70 kilometres north-west of Paris, painting the fields around his house. A recurring eye infection made long spells in the open air difficult by then, and a barn in his garden had been fitted out as a studio with a wide window onto the meadow. The picture is that meadow at the height of summer, tall dry grass, poplars, willows in the distance. Down in the left corner, small and easy to miss, a woman in a straw hat sits in the shade. The title he gave it names the sunlight before it names her.