Two Young Peasant Women

By the early 1890s the French countryside Pissarro loved was emptying out, as railways and new factories pulled a generation off the land and into the cities. He had anarchist sympathies and wanted to hold on to that vanishing farm world, so at his house in Eragny he set two young field workers at the centre of a wide canvas, pausing in the middle of their day. Notice the odd, tilted viewpoint that tips the field up toward you and catches one woman in profile, the other from slightly above. That came out of the etchings he was making with his friend Degas, both of them studying Japanese prints. He finished the picture in January 1892 for a large exhibition in Paris, then held this one back and gave it to his wife.