The House of the Deaf Woman and the Belfry at Eragny

By 1886 Pissarro was in his mid-fifties and the oldest of the Impressionists, the only one who had shown in every one of their group exhibitions. That year he did something the others found baffling. He threw in his lot with two painters half his age, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and took up their method of building a picture from small separate dots of pure colour. This is Eragny, the Normandy village where he lived with his large family, and the view is simply over a neighbour's yard toward the church spire. The deaf woman of the title was that neighbour. Every leaf and wall is stippled in careful warm and cool touches meant to mix in the viewer's eye. He kept at this painstaking manner for only about three years before returning to a looser brush.