Pommiers en fleurs, Eragny

Pissarro moved to Eragny-sur-Epte, a small village on the Paris-Dieppe road, in 1884. He wrote to his son Lucien, '"the house is superb. It's two hours from Paris; I've found the countryside more beautiful than Compiègne. Spring's beginning, the pastures are green, the distant silhouette's fine.' Working in an even more confined orbit than at Louceviennes or L'Hermitage, for almost two decades Pissarro chose the nearby meadows as the regular site for his contemplation of nature…The heavy paint surface and close values recall his paintings of the 1860s, although the textures are more varied and the color range is more resonant. The apparent surrender to the rhythms and roughness of nature reminds us how considered and constructed the images of the meadows at Eragny are. For all their attention to the specific effet, these paintings place before us various fictions: of man subsumed by nature, of man composing nature, of man owning nature" (R. Thomson, Camille Pissarro, London, 1990, pp. 81-82 and 84).
Discussing these fine luminescent works of the Eragny period, Christopher Lloyd writes, "One of the more important aspects of this final period is the return to subject-matter traditionally associated with Impressionism. It is as if Pissarro was determined to reassess Impressionism. The rural paintings dating from the 1890s retain a luminosity of texture that is derived from the close working of the surfaces of his neo-impressionist paintings. There is an intensity about these paintings that enriches them with an almost visionary quality" (C. Lloyd and A. Distel, Pissarro, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1980, p. 134).