La cosecha

In January 1882 the Union Generale bank collapsed in Paris and took down the financier who was bankrolling Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer holding most of the Impressionists' unsold stock. Durand-Ruel stopped buying and put on the seventh Impressionist exhibition anyway, that March. Pissarro sent this harvest scene to it. He had been working at Pontoise, north-west of Paris, for ten years and was about to leave it for good. The two women at the front of the field mark a change in what he was doing. Figures had been small incidents in his landscapes before this. Here one stands holding a sheaf and another bends beside her, and dozens of watercolour and chalk studies went into settling them. He painted it in tempera, which dries matt and chalky, closer to a wall painting than to oil.