Camille Pissarro, 'A Wool-Carder', 1880

A woman sits on the grass in the centre of the painting, her location, and the way in which she is dressed, telling us that she is an agricultural labourer. Her clothes are baggy and plain, and she wears a simple white cap. A basket behind her is overflowing with something white, which the title of the painting tells us is wool. She is holding some of this in her hands, although here it is painted a pale cream colour, and she looks down at what she is doing: wool carding is the first stage in the production of woollen yarn. Having been shorn from a sheep, the raw wool is combed to untangle the fibres and align them, thus making it easier to spin a single thread.

We are at the edge of a field bordered by bushes and trees. In the top-right corner, a gaggle of geese are honking at something further to the right, outside the picture. When first exhibited at the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition in 1880, the catalogue gave the painting its original title: The Goose Girl (Mayenne). Camille Pissarro regularly travelled to Mayenne, in north-west France, to visit a friend, Ludovic Piette, who was also an artist. He continued to do so even after Piette’s death and, while there, he often painted the landscape and its inhabitants.

Pissarro was the only artist to have works included in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions. Unlike several of the other members of the group, Pissarro was not particularly interested in the observation of middle-class life in the city, preferring to focus on rural scenes and working people. After his early landscape views, in the 1870s he became more interested in painting individuals, increasing their scale so that they took up more of the picture surface. He adopted a high viewpoint, as he did in A Wool-Carder, which suggests that we are looking down onto the subject. Most of the painting is taken up with grass or, where it is thin, soil, and it is only at the top of the picture that we see the base of the trees. There is no sign of the sky or the horizon, and this also helps to focus our attention on the wool-carder.

A curious feature of this work is that it is painted on concrete, a very unusual support. It is not clear why Pissarro chose to do this. He might have been trying to emulate fresco, which is painted directly onto wet plaster and, like A Wool-Carder, favours light colours on a pale ground. Unfortunately, the technique was not entirely successful: the painting has been broken (and repaired) more than once. Eventually, Pissarro’s son Lucien (also an artist) donated it to what was then called the Tate Gallery, for safekeeping as much as anything. It has been on loan to the National Gallery since 1997.