Two Peasant Women in a Meadow (Le Pré)

In January 2014 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston let the public choose what would hang in a spring exhibition of its Impressionist pictures. In three weeks 41,497 votes came in, the 30 favourites went on the walls, and this meadow finished ninth. Its French title is simply Le Pré, the meadow. Pissarro was living at Éragny, on the river Epte, and the fields around his house were his everyday subject. Here tall poplars stand on the left, a roof shows through the trees, and far off in the middle distance a few cows are grazing. The two women are kept low in the bottom left corner, one sitting in the grass, the other standing beside her with a basket on her arm. The canvas is upright and more than 90 centimetres tall, which leaves almost half of it to the sky. He signed and dated it 1893, and on 17 March that year he sold it to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.