Late Afternoon in our Meadow

In 1884 Pissarro settled with his family in the village of Eragny. He painted a number of views of this meadow which is planted with small trees still surrounded by their protective cages. It is late afternoon and the long shadows thrown by the trees radiate out in a fan shape towards the left corner. A solitary figure stands in the sun, a basket in one hand, the other on her hip.

In 1885 Pissarro met Georges Seurat and subsequently adopted his pointillist technique of applying small dots of colour alongside each other to create an optical mixture. Here he has enlivened the underlying green of the grass with small touches of pink and yellow, while using blue, mauve and the odd touch of orange ...