羊毛を梳く農婦

By 1875 almost all French wool was carded by machine, in the mills of Roubaix and Elbeuf. What survived in the countryside was hand work, a pair of wire brushes pulling raw fleece apart before it could be spun, done for the household rather than for sale. Pissarro was living at Pontoise, a market town on the Oise about 30 kilometres from Paris, and he painted the people who worked there rather than the Parisians who came out at weekends. Figures like this were still uncommon in his work in 1875; peasants became his main subject only in the 1880s. The canvas was bought by the Zurich arms manufacturer Emil Buehrle, and his collection has hung at the Kunsthaus Zuerich on long loan since 2021.