Colheita de Feno em Éragny

Pissarro painted this in 1901, near the end of a long life and settled at Éragny on the river Epte, where he had lived since 1884 and would stay until his death two years later. By this point he was the elder of the Impressionists, and this is his own countryside, the flat fields he watched through every season from his studio window. The hay harvest fills the canvas with figures bending and gathering, their poses repeated across the field so the whole surface takes on a steady rhythm, work seen as pattern rather than incident. The paint is broken into small separate touches of colour, a habit he had picked up from the younger Divisionists and then loosened to suit his own eye. The light is high summer, and the labour is the ordinary labour of the village he had made his home.