Autumn Morning at Eragny

Pissarro settled in Eragny, a village in the Oise valley, in 1884, and it became the fixed base from which he painted for the rest of his life. By 1897, when this work was made, he had passed through a decade-long experiment with Pointillism alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and had returned, with renewed authority, to a looser Impressionist touch. The Eragny canvases of the mid-to-late 1890s are widely regarded as the culmination of his landscape practice: the systematic dot of the Divisionist years is dissolved back into a freer, more intuitive stroke, but the structural intelligence gained from that period remains in the way colour relationships are weighed across the surface. Pissarro was also contending in these years with a debilitating eye condition that forced him to paint through closed windows during winter; the open-air autumn subjects, worked directly before the motif, carried particular weight as unimpeded encounters with the landscape he loved. Works from the Eragny series are held in major collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Tate in London, testifying to the enduring critical esteem in which this body of work is held.