Hay Harvest at Éragny

Hay Harvest at Éragny at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, painted in 1901, is one of Pissarro's most summery and abundant late rural subjects — the haymaking season at his Norman home painted with the richness of colour and freedom of handling that characterized his final productive years. The National Gallery of Canada, which holds one of the country's most significant collections of international and Canadian art, acquired this late Pissarro as part of its European holdings. Haymaking was among the defining subjects of French landscape painting from Millet onward, carrying associations with the agricultural abundance of rural France and with the collective physical labour of the farming community. Pissarro's version, made at seventy-one with arthritis already limiting his mobility, celebrates the sensory richness of the subject — the warm golden light of high summer, the scent and texture of cut hay, the rhythm of collective labour — without any of the elegiac quality that his age and declining health might have prompted.

Pissarro renders the hay harvest with his mature Neo-Impressionist or post-Neo-Impressionist handling — the agricultural activity depicted with his characteristic combination of social observation (the specific figures of the haymakers at their labor) and atmospheric investigation (the quality of the summer light on the cut hay and on the working figures). His late palette maintained the coloristic richness of his Neo-Impressionist period within a handling less rigidly systematic than his pure divisionist works.