Casas de campesinos, Éragny

Pissarro was 57 when he painted this, and had just made the most unpopular decision of his career. In 1886 he insisted that the young Georges Seurat and Paul Signac hang in the eighth Impressionist exhibition, over the objections of the friends he had been showing with since 1874, and he took up their method himself, building the picture out of separate small touches of colour. Buyers hated it. His dealer struggled to move the dotted canvases and the money troubles that had followed him all his life got worse. The subject is the village he had moved to in 1884, Éragny-sur-Epte in Normandy, where he rented a house he could only afford to buy years later with a loan from Monet. He gave the method up around 1890, saying it would not let him follow his own sensations.