Camille Pissarro, Late Afternoon in our Meadow

In 1884 Pissarro settled with his family in Eragny, a village to the north of Paris, where he was to live for the rest of his life. During this period he painted a number of views of this meadow, which is planted with small trees, young saplings 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. As is typical of Pissarro’s landscapes, he has included a solitary figure standing in the sun, a basket in one hand, the other on her hip.

In 1885 Pissarro met Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and subsequently adopted Seurat’s pointillist technique of applying small dots of colour alongside each other on the canvas to create an optical mixture, as can be seen in Seurat’s The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe. The technique was rooted in the scientific theories of colour published by the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and physicist Ogden Rood, and notable features included the juxtaposition of complementary colours, dots of yellows and oranges added to sunlit areas, and blues and purples to shadows. Here Pissarro has created a shimmering surface with numerous separate touches of paint. In the grass, an under layer of greens and yellows is overlaid with pinks and yellows, the areas of darker greens overlaid with blues, mauves and the odd touch of orange. In the landscape these brushstrokes are strongly horizontal, whereas in the trees the foliage is created with more vertical strokes in varying shades of green, dark built up to light. The creams, yellows and blues of the densely applied curvilinear strokes in the sky reinforce the pervading atmosphere of shimmering light.

At the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, the pointillist paintings of Seurat, Signac, Pissarro and his son Lucien, were displayed in a separate section. Their appearance prompted the critic Félix Fénéon to invent the term ‘Neo-Impressionism’. Over the next year or so, however, Pissarro gradually abandoned this technique, finding that the laborious application of paint took away any spontaneity in painting.