Autumn Poplars, Eragny

Pissarro settled at Éragny in 1884 and returned obsessively to its orchards, kitchen gardens and poplars for the rest of his life, producing some of his most sustained and personal work there. By 1894, the year this canvas was painted, he had passed through his Pointillist experiment with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and deliberately retreated from its rigid systematic dot to recover the spontaneity of his earlier Impressionist touch. The Éragny landscapes of the early 1890s are the direct evidence of that recovery: the broken stroke is back, but now informed by a heightened awareness of colour relationships that the divisionist years had sharpened. Pissarro was also, at this moment, navigating the anti-Semitic climate of France with quiet stoicism, finding in the rhythms of the Norman countryside a subject that demanded nothing political and returned everything pictorial. Works from this Éragny cycle entered major collections across Europe and North America during his lifetime, and the series as a whole is now regarded as one of the definitive achievements of late nineteenth-century landscape painting.