エラニーの洗濯女

Pissarro had been renting the house at Eragny, a village on the river Epte some 70 kilometres northwest of Paris, since 1884, and in 1892 he finally managed to buy it, with money lent to him by Monet. This washerwoman was painted the year after that. She is working two barrels, scrubbing linen in one and rinsing it in the other, while the grass and the trees behind her are put down in small separated touches left over from the dotted technique he had worked in through the late 1880s. To get the sunlight he pushed pure yellow into the green while the paint was still soft. The canvas is a small one, a little over 45 centimetres tall. The composer Richard Rodgers and his wife gave it to the Metropolitan in 1964.