Haymaking, Éragny

1880s

A search for something new: peasant labour without idealisation

By the 1880s some Impressionists felt the movement had exhausted itself, and Pissarro returned to scenes of country life, showing people at work without idealising them; in 1882 Renoir called these works “revolutionary”.

1880s

Theo van Gogh asks him to take in Vincent

The art dealer Theo van Gogh asked Pissarro whether he would take his elder brother Vincent as a lodger in his house; according to his son Lucien, Pissarro was impressed by Van Gogh's work, foresaw his fame and explained to him different ways of seeking and expressing light and colour.

1884

Settles at Éragny-sur-Epte

In April 1884 Pissarro and his family settled at Éragny-sur-Epte, a village near Gisors, where he lived for the rest of his life; he wrote to his son Lucien that the house was superb, with a garden and meadows. The house, garden, orchard, meadows and farm workers became recurring subjects for the last nineteen years of his career.

1885–1888

Pointillism: working beside Seurat and Signac

In 1885 Pissarro came into close contact with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, whose technique juxtaposed small strokes of relatively pure colour, and until 1888 he experimented extensively with it, regarding it not as a rejection of Impressionism but as a possible continuation of it; among the older Impressionists this was unusual.

1886

The eighth Impressionist exhibition

At the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition Pissarro showed works in the new method in a separate grouping with Seurat, Signac and his son Lucien; the marked change in his technique attracted considerable attention from the critics.

late 1880s

Abandoning Neo-Impressionism

By the end of the 1880s Pissarro found the method of divided colour too restrictive: it made it hard to respond freely to changing effects of nature, movement and personal sensation; what remained from the experiment was a heightened attention to colour relationships and a more structured handling of the surface.