A Cowherd at Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise

A Cowherd at Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was painted in 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, at a moment when the collective identity of the movement was still being formed. Pissarro participated in the first exhibition — he was, uniquely, the only painter to show in all eight Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 to 1886 — and his contribution of landscapes and figure subjects helped establish the breadth of the movement's approach. The cowherd tending cattle in the Auvers countryside connects his Impressionist practice to the tradition of pastoral painting that Millet had established in the 1850s and 1860s, but Pissarro's treatment is more directly observed and less symbolically weighted than Millet's monumental peasant figures. The Metropolitan Museum's canvas documents Impressionism at its birth — painted in the year the movement named itself, in a rural landscape that both continued and transformed the tradition of French pastoral painting that had preceded it.

Pissarro uses a loosely structured composition with the cowherd and cattle placed in the middle ground against a high horizon. The foreground is built in varied greens and ochres, with characteristic broken brushwork suggesting the texture of grass and soil. The sky occupies the upper third in the airy, open manner of his mature plein-air style.