Ploughed Fields

Pissarro painted this bare, furrowed field near Pontoise in 1874, the same spring he and his friends mounted their own exhibition in Paris, the one a critic mocked as 'impressionist' and so named the movement. There is nothing picturesque in his choice, just turned earth under a wide sky, ordinary farmland rather than a view. He sold it that August to the dealer Pere Martin. Its later life carried it far from Pontoise. The Moscow industrialist Ivan Morozov bought it in 1904, his collection was seized by the state after the 1917 revolution, and the painting eventually passed to the Pushkin Museum, where it hangs now.