Woman With Wheelbarrow

1892 was the year Pissarro finally owned the house he had been painting from. That January the dealer Durand-Ruel gave him a large retrospective in Paris which sold well, and with what it brought in, plus 15,000 francs lent by his friend Monet, he bought the property at Eragny, north-west of Paris, that his family had been renting since 1884. He was 62. The garden and orchard behind that house supplied most of his subjects for the rest of his life, and the people in them are usually at work, like this woman with her wheelbarrow among the trees. His eyes were already troubling him, a recurring infection of the tear duct that kept him out of the cold and, within a few years, had him painting boulevards through hotel windows instead.