Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook

In November 1894, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien about this canvas, describing a little peasant girl dipping her feet in the water. He thought it nearly finished, yet felt it still lacked, in his own words, that little something, and told Lucien he was sure he would get it. By then Pissarro was in his sixties, settled at Éragny in the countryside northwest of Paris, painting the rural women around him with the small, dense strokes you can follow across the bank and the stream. The pose held onto him. The next year he painted the same girl in the same brook again, this time as a nude, a subject he almost never touched, and that second version now hangs at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The one here keeps her clothed, bent to the cool water on an ordinary afternoon.