The Great Walnut Tree, Morning, Eragny

By 1901 Pissarro had been living at Éragny, a village northwest of Paris, for about 17 years, and the big walnut tree at the bottom of his garden had become one of his steady subjects. He was 71 that year, and a chronic infection in one eye kept him from working long in wind or bright sun, so much of his late looking happened close to home, from windows and from the garden he knew by heart. Like Monet with his haystacks, he painted this tree over and over, in winter, in autumn, at different hours, and this is the morning version, the light still low and cool. What he set down is an ordinary corner of his own property, the same few fields and the same tree he had watched change for years.