Landscape with Flock of Sheep

Landscape with Flock of Sheep at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, painted in 1889, belongs to Pissarro's Neo-Impressionist phase and shows his divisionist technique applied to the pastoral subject of sheep in a Norman field. The Norton Simon Museum, which holds one of California's most distinguished private collections of European and Asian art, acquired this Neo-Impressionist landscape as part of its significant French holdings. The flock of sheep as a landscape element had pastoral associations that went back through Millet and Barbizon painting to the Dutch seventeenth century, and Pissarro's treatment — subjecting the traditional pastoral subject to the scientific colour division of Neo-Impressionism — creates an interesting tension between the subject's traditional associations and its avant-garde technique. By 1889 he was already beginning to question whether the systematic pointillist approach was compatible with the direct outdoor observation that was his fundamental practice, and canvases like this one document that productive tension in its most active phase.

Pissarro built his canvases with short, woven strokes of color applied in all directions, creating densely textured surfaces that shimmer with atmospheric light. His palette is characteristically muted and silvery — grays, greens.