Woman Hanging Laundry, Éragny

By 1887 Pissarro was 57 and had spent two years laying his colour down in small separate touches, the method Seurat and Signac had brought him. It was costing him buyers. Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had handled the Impressionists for years, denounced the new canvases. The one who took them was Theo van Gogh, who ran the Boussod, Valadon gallery on the boulevard Montmartre and had met Pissarro that year through the painter's son Lucien.

Working dot by dot was slow, and it ruled out the passing weather effects Pissarro had chased in the 1870s. So he painted what stayed put, the garden and fields around the house he rented at Éragny-sur-Epte, near Gisors. A woman pinning up washing was there on any ordinary morning.

He gave the method up around 1890, saying it kept him from following his own sensations. This canvas is 41 centimetres tall, and it reached the Musée d'Orsay in 1972 as a bequest made in the name of the collector Eduardo Mollard.