Woman and Child at the Well

A woman in a blue skirt and red bodice draws water at a well while a small child crouches beside her, the two figures set in a sunlit landscape of pale greens and golds that shimmer with the broken, restless brushwork of high Impressionism. Camille Pissarro painted the canvas in 1882, at Eragny, the Norman farmstead where he had settled with his family and where he was producing some of the most joyful and liberated of his late landscapes — here, though, it is the human figure that holds the picture, the woman’s patient, repeated motion at the well and the child’s absorbed attention holding the light-filled scene together. Pissarro, the oldest and most loyal of the Impressionists, had by 1882 worked his way past the first Impressionist exhibitions into a style of his own, at once more structured than Monet’s and more luminous than Seurat’s, and the figure of the mother at the well is as much a study of light on blue cloth and red wool as it is a genre scene. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.