The Wheelbarrow in the Orchard, Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise

Le Valhermeil is a hamlet of Auvers-sur-Oise, a short walk up the river from Pontoise, the town where Pissarro was living in these years. Around 1879 he set up in an orchard there. Apple trees fill most of the canvas, their leaves broken into short, busy strokes, and under them a woman walks beside a wheelbarrow with an armful of something green. The picture waited several years for its public. It was shown in the spring of 1886 at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, held in rooms at 1 rue Laffitte in Paris. It entered the national collections in 1896, and from 2014 to 2024 the Musée d'Orsay lent it to the Pissarro museum in Pontoise, a few kilometres from the orchard where it was painted.