Landscape (Orchard)

Landscape (Orchard) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, painted in 1892, belongs to the sustained orchard investigation that Pissarro had begun at Pontoise and continued at Éragny with the commitment of someone for whom the planted fruit tree row was the most personally meaningful of landscape types. By 1892 he had been living in Éragny for eight years and the orchards around the village were among his most intimately known subjects; he had just abandoned Neo-Impressionism and returned to a freer Impressionist technique, and this canvas shows the recovered warmth and directness of his post-pointillist handling. The Philadelphia Museum's deep Pissarro holdings — spanning his career from early works through his late urban series — hold this orchard landscape alongside the industrial and urban subjects that occupy the same collection, revealing the breadth of his practice across the rural-urban spectrum and the consistency of his observational intelligence regardless of whether the subject was a Norman orchard or a Rouen factory.

The ordered rows of orchard trees provide spatial recession through regular diminution of scale, a structure Pissarro overlays with his broken-colour atmospheric treatment. The sky above the orchard canopy takes up a significant portion of the canvas, its luminosity giving the composition a sense of open air despite the enclosed feeling of the planted rows. The ground between trees is rendered in earthy neutrals that anchor the composition.