Vista da aldeia de Éragny

Pissarro moved his family to Éragny-sur-Epte in 1884 and painted the same fields and the same church spire for the rest of his life, though he rented the house for eight years before Monet lent him the money to buy it. 1885, the date on this canvas, was the year the ground shifted under him. He was 55, with a reputation and almost no money, when he met Seurat and Signac in Paris that autumn, and he spent the three years after that painting in their method of separate dots, which put off the dealers who had finally begun to buy him. The Birmingham Museum of Art acquired the picture at the end of the 1970s with money raised at the museum's own dinner and ball, and hung it with the 19th century, the spire of the village church rising through the middle of it.