The Great Walnut Tree at Eragny, Autumn, Sketch

By 1890 Camille Pissarro had had enough of dots. For about four years he had built his pictures from tiny separate touches of colour, working alongside the younger Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and he had come to feel the method was too slow and had drained the spontaneity from his painting. This is a sketch, made quickly, of the big walnut tree that stood near his house at Éragny, the village northwest of Paris where he had settled in 1884. He caught the autumn tree in loose, rapid strokes, the opposite of the patient stippling he was giving up that very year. The same walnut turns up in other Éragny canvases, painted bare in winter and in spring leaf, and this autumn study is among the quickest of them.