The Harvest, Pontoise (La Récolte, Pontoise)

By 1881 Camille Pissarro had been living and painting around Pontoise, north-west of Paris, for years, and the town had quietly become a school. Paul Cezanne used to walk several miles to join him in the fields there, and later said Pissarro had been like a father to him, a man to consult. This canvas shows what they kept looking at together, country people bent over a summer harvest, gathering potatoes under a high pale sky. Pissarro painted the same potato-gathering many times across some 30 years, in pencil, gouache and oil. The brushwork here is already breaking into small separate touches, the kind of dab the younger Georges Seurat would soon build a whole method on. The workers are given no faces to speak of, only the shapes of steady labour.