Peasant Woman Carrying Two Bundles of Hay

Peasant Woman Carrying Two Bundles of Hay at the Dallas Museum of Art, painted in 1883, shows a working woman under the extreme physical burden of two large bundles of hay — a subject that makes the physical reality of agricultural labour its explicit content in a way that more conventionally landscaped views of the working countryside only implied. Pissarro's figure subjects from the early 1880s are among his most politically committed: the haymaking peasant woman, bent under her load, was a direct statement that the physical labour of the body deserved artistic recognition equivalent to any more elevated subject. The Dallas Museum of Art's Pissarro holdings include multiple works from different phases of his career, and this figure study connects to the market and washerwoman subjects of the same period in the consistency of its focus on women's physical labour as a worthy pictorial subject. The painting has precedents in Millet's heroic peasant figures of the 1850s, but Pissarro's version is more directly observed and less symbolically weighted — less monument and more document.

The figure dominates the composition, placed centrally with the landscape providing a subsidiary backdrop. The weight of the hay bundles is expressed through the figure's posture and the way the load compresses her downward. Pissarro uses warm ochre and golden tones for the hay, contrasting with the cool blues and greens of the sky and distant field.