Spring Pasture

Spring Pasture at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, painted in 1889, belongs to Pissarro's Neo-Impressionist phase, when he was applying Seurat's divisionist method to the familiar Éragny pastoral subjects that had been his concern since moving to the village in 1884. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts holds multiple Pissarro works from across his career, with particular strength in his Éragny and late-period subjects, and its spring pasture is one of several Norman landscapes from the late 1880s that document his technical experiment at its fullest. The pasture in spring — fresh green grass, young animals, the renewed warmth after the Norman winter — offered the richest possible palette for his divisionist investigation: the varied greens of new growth, the warm ochres of bare earth still showing through, the deep blue of a clear spring sky. The contrast between the labour-intensive pointillist technique and the apparently effortless abundance of a spring morning gave these canvases their particular quality of sustained, scientific attention to natural beauty.

Spring greens are handled in Pissarro's most luminous, aerated touch — small strokes of fresh yellow-green, grass-green, and pale blue-green building a vibrant surface. The sky, a clear spring blue, is rendered with larger, more sweeping strokes that contrast with the busy surface of the pasture below. Cows or other animals in the middle ground provide scale and a warm colour accent within the predominantly cool-green field.