Femme à la brouette, a magnificent canvas from 1892, exemplifies Camille Pissarro’s evocative depictions of daily life in and around his home in the pastoral village of Éragny. Pissarro and his family moved to Éragny, located along the river Oise (a tributary of the Seine on its flow northwest from Paris), in the spring of 1884. In July 1892 Pissarro purchased the house his family had been renting for the previous eight years with the financial help of Claude Monet, who lived in neighboring Giverny. The house exists to this day, on a street named after the artist. Pissarro was delighted with the tranquility of his new environment and the endless inspiration it offered him. In a letter to his son Lucien dated March 1, 1884, the artist wrote: “Yes, we’ve made up our minds on Éragny-sur-Epte. The house is superb and inexpensive: a thousand francs, with garden and meadow. It’s two hours from Paris. I found the region much more beautiful than Compiègne… Gisors is superb: we’d seen nothing!” (quoted in J. Pissarro & C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., p. 499).

In the present work a woman pushes a wheelbarrow of cabbages along a narrow country lane, followed by a tottering blonde child, presumably her daughter. Such quotidian scenes filled Pissarro’s canvases that he painted both in his studio—the adjoining barn which he converted to this purpose in 1893—and on a portable easel which he wheeled around at his leisure (see fig. 1). Country folk had appeared in his canvases from his earliest forays into painting in Caracas and on the island of St. Thomas, and again quite regularly when he settled in Europe permanently. More than any other Impressionist artist Pissarro sought to depict rural workers without a specific agenda, whether to contemplate their plight or romanticize their bucolic surroundings: “Rather than peasants, they are more accurately rural workers whose labor in the fields is balanced both by plentiful leisure time and by their participation in the small-scale capitalist economy of French agricultural markets. We never see gleaners taking the dregs of the harvest after the master has housed the grain, nor do we see bodies broken down by work. Instead, they are strong and hardy rather than graceful and conventionally beautiful. Pissarro was perhaps the first great painter of French rural life who actually revealed a kind of relaxed beauty in fieldwork, which he associated with women as much as with men” (R. Bretell, Pisarro’s People (exhibition catalogue), Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco & Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 2011-12, p. 171). Pissarro delighted in depicting his subjects both in large, open fields such as in Gelée blanche, jeune paysanne faisant du feu and in close detail such as that found in Sorting Cabbages of 1883-95 (see figs. 2 & 3). Femme à la brouette is particularly notable in Pissarro’s precise handling of paint; each brushstroke is lush and carefully applied with the density of the painted surface most concentrated on the female figure which allows the composition as a whole to act as a subtle halo around the primary subject and activity of the painting. This kind of highly textured surface along with the dazzling play of light and shadow exemplifies the artist’s best work.

The critical and commercial success of Pissarro’s first major retrospective which was held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in January 1892 brought a new confidence and stability to his life. In 1892 he was sixty-two years old. One of the most prominent avant-garde painters of his generation, Pissarro had achieved enormous success as both an Impressionist and a Neo-Impressionist. Adjusting certain elements from his classic Impressionist period of the 1870s and combining them with characteristics of his Neo-Impressionist style of the 1880s meant that by the early 1890s Pissarro developed an entirely fresh approach to painting. In his review for the 1892 exhibition, the same year the present work was painted, published in Le Figaro, the writer Octave Mirbeau described the artist’s visual concerns: “The eye of the artist, like the mind of the thinker, discovers the larger aspects of things, their wholeness and unity. Even when he paints figures in scenes of rustic life, man is always seen in perspective in the vast terrestrial harmony, like a human plant. To describe the drama of the earth and to move our hearts, M. Pissarro does not need violent gestures, complicated arabesques and sinister branches against livid skies…. An orchard, with its apple trees in rows, its brick houses in the background and some women under the trees, bending and gathering the apples which have fallen to the ground, and a whole life is evoked, a dream rises up, soars, and such a simple thing, so familiar to our eyes, transforms itself into an ideal vision, amplified and raised to a great decorative poetry” (quoted in R. E. Shikes & P. Harper, Pissarro: His Life and Work, New York, 1980, pp. 261-62).