The pea harvest

Theo van Gogh, who ran a gallery on the boulevard Montmartre for the dealers Boussod and Valadon, wrote to Pissarro in September 1887 offering 300 francs for this gouache. Pissarro was working in dots at Éragny then, out of step with the buyers who wanted his older manner, and the money mattered. The sheet passed later to the dealer Paul Rosenberg, and then to Simon Bauer, a Paris shoe manufacturer whose collection was confiscated in 1943 under the Vichy measures against Jewish-owned property. Bauer was held at Drancy, survived, and died in 1947 without recovering it. The gouache came up at auction in New York in 1995, and when its American owners lent it to a Pissarro exhibition in Paris in 2017 it was seized by court order and awarded to Bauer's heirs.