A Washerwoman at Eragny

Pissarro felt an affinity for the daily rhythms of peasant life that he witnessed around his home in the village of Eragny, not far from Paris. This washerwoman is hard at work, scrubbing linens and clothing in one barrel and rinsing them in another. The artist depicted the surrounding landscape with dappled touches of his brush—a legacy of the Pointillist style that he adopted in the mid-1880s. To suggest the effect of shimmering sunlight, he mixed pure yellow paint into the greens of the grass and trees while the pigment was still wet.