The Le Friche Farm at Osny

In 1883 Pissarro was renting a house at Osny, a farming village just west of Pontoise. He had about 18 months there before he moved on to Éragny, and in that time the Friche farm, close enough to walk to, became one of the motifs he kept coming back to. He was 53, and he had just had his first one-man show, 70 paintings, gouaches, pastels and watercolours that Durand-Ruel hung in May on the boulevard de la Madeleine in Paris. Osny had a second painter that year. Paul Gauguin, who had been earning his living in the Paris stock market, came out repeatedly to work the same village, the same lanes and mills, and in October 1883 he wrote to Pissarro to say he had decided to leave business and live as a painter.