Pommiers et peupliers, Éragny, soleil couchant

Pissarro bought the house at Eragny, a village northwest of Paris, in 1884, and spent the last 20 years of his life painting the orchard and fields around it through every season and hour. By 1901, when he made this, he was 71 and troubled by a chronic eye infection that often kept him indoors, so many late works look out from an upstairs window rather than from a stool in the grass. Here the low sun comes through the poplars and the apple trees at the edge of the field, broken into small strokes of orange, green and violet that he had learned partly from the younger Neo-Impressionists before loosening their strict method. He worked this same corner of Eragny in dozens of canvases. He would die in Paris two years later, in 1903.