The Harvest of Hay in Eragny La Récolte des Foins, Eragny Camille Pissarro Original Title: Le Recolte des Foins a Eragny Date: 1887 Style: Pointillism Genre: genre painting Media: oil, canvas Location: Private Collection
After 1884, Pissarro settled in Eragny, a rural village three miles south of Pontoise that became the subject of hundreds of his paintings. In the 1880s, Pissarro acted as both student and mentor to the Neo-Impressionists Signac and Seurat, and Hay Harvest at Eragny (1887) shows the results of their collaborative experiments in tonal value and painting style. Notably, though several of the Impressionists grew away from the movement in the 1880s and beyond, Pissarro is the only one to move into the Neo-Impressionist style seen here. More than ever before, his short, dashed brushstrokes evince something akin to Pointillism, weaving together landscape and figure. Recalling the cloud sketches of British landscapist John Constable (1821-22) and prefiguring Monet's series of views of Rouen Cathedral (1892-93), Pissarro studied the effects of seasonal conditions on color, depicting the varying seasons and creating multiple paintings of the same subject at different points throughout the year. His painting is carefully structured by the semicircle of hay bales and the sharp diagonals of the workers' tools, which coax the eye to meander into the luminous fields in the distant background of the composition. While the clothing is that of the French countryside, the figures and their peaceful surroundings achieve a certain universality via the lack of recognizable landmarks and the anonymity with which Pissarro paints the peasants' facial features.
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