Camille Pissarro

Toward the end of 1889, Pissarro began to move away from his Neo-Impressionist phase, and again he began painting directly from nature, with the broad brushstrokes characteristic of his earlier work. In a letter to Claude Monet, the artist exclaimed, "It seemed so good to me to work outside; it had been two years since I last dared to attempt the adventure!" (quoted in Janine Bailly-Herzberg, ed., Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, vol. 3, Paris 1988, p. 111).

In Berger sous l'averse, Pissarro contrasts the serious posture and costume of his subject with the cool green landscape that surrounds him. Joachim Pissarro writes of his great-grandfather's treatment of peasant figures: "This profuse diversity of figures involved in the dynamics of everyday chores, breathes simplicity—unadorned simplicity—a quality in art that Pissarro consciously developed and prized, in pictorial, literary, or even theatrical fields... Pisarro's figures are simple ('apparently') and sincere. They are not on show and no pretense of any sort animates their action or their pictorial representation. They have nothing to say; they are withdrawn or absorbed by their reverie or their chores" (Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York 1993, p. 161).