La Fenaison, Éragny

In 1887 Camille Pissarro, the oldest of the Impressionists at 57, was painting in a way that annoyed most of his old friends. He had fallen in with the young Georges Seurat and taken up their new method, laying colour down in thousands of small separate dots meant to blend in the viewer's eye. This hayfield near his home at Eragny is built entirely that way, and Pissarro wrote to his son that he had wrestled with it for days to get the effect he wanted. There is a thread here back to the museum that owns it now. In 1887 the painting passed through the hands of the Paris art dealer Theo van Gogh, whose brother Vincent admired Pissarro's colour and was living with Theo in the city just then.