Young Peasant Having Her Coffee

Pissarro had built his name on landscape, and around 1880, at 50, he turned to the people who worked in it. He was living at Pontoise, northwest of Paris, and painted local girls at ordinary tasks, sitting down to coffee, tending a fire, fetching water. He took a run of them to the seventh Impressionist exhibition in 1882, where 27 of his 36 canvases had figures in them. Critics reached for Jean-Francois Millet, the painter of noble peasants a generation earlier, and the novelist Huysmans wrote that Pissarro had finally shaken Millet off, painting country people without false grandeur, simply as he saw them. The brushwork here treats the wool of her clothes and the wall behind her the same way, small strokes laid side by side.