The Nap, Peasant Woman Lying in the Grass, Pontoise

Around 1882 Pissarro, then in his early fifties, changed what he put at the centre of his canvases. For years he had painted the fields and roofs around Pontoise, the town north of Paris where he had settled, with people small in the distance. Now the figure came forward. This resting peasant woman fills the foreground, her landscape reduced to the grass she lies in. He was thinking about Millet, the older painter famous for his dignified labourers, but Pissarro keeps the loose, bright touch of an Impressionist. Of all that circle he was the steady one, the only painter to show in every one of their eight group exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Soon after this he left Pontoise for good.