大胡桃树,秋日清晨,埃拉尼

Pissarro settled at Éragny, a small village in Normandy, in 1884, and spent his last 20 years painting the same orchard, fields and weather over and over. By the 1890s a persistent eye ailment made it hard for him to work outdoors in cold or wind, so he often set up indoors and painted what he could see from a window. This autumn morning, from 1897, looks across his own land to a big walnut tree, the light thin and the colours cooling toward the end of the season. He was in his late 60s and the oldest of the Impressionists, still tracking the same ground through every shift of hour and season. Monet had lent him money years earlier to help buy the house.