Young Peasant Girls Resting in the Fields near Pontoise

Young Peasant Girls Resting in the Fields near Pontoise records a quiet moment of country life in the market town and its farmlands that Camille Pissarro made his own territory. In the early 1880s Pissarro increasingly brought assured figures into his landscapes, and here two girls pause in their field work, their sturdy forms anchored to the earth as the spring furrows run behind them. The long, rhythmic strokes and the tender greens and rusts of the ground show the pacific, naturalistic manner of the painter who was counted the most devoted of the Impressionists.