Gelée blanche à Ennery

When this hung at the first Impressionist show in the spring of 1874, one Paris critic looked at the frost lying along the ploughed furrows and dismissed it as palette scrapings smeared evenly across a dirty canvas. Pissarro had painted it the winter before, out on the old road near Ennery, north of Paris, where he had settled after fleeing the Franco-Prussian War. The low winter sun throws long blue shadows of trees that stand outside the picture, off to the left. A single figure carries a bundle of sticks along the field. Other viewers that year compared him instead to Millet, the painter of peasant labour, whose plain country subjects Pissarro admired and carried into a looser, brighter way of working.