Summer Landscape, Eragny

Summer Landscape, Éragny at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, painted in 1887, was made during Pissarro's Neo-Impressionist phase, the year after he had officially adopted Seurat's divisionist method. The canvas belongs to the period when he was testing the new technique against his familiar Éragny subjects, and the question of whether and how divisionism — a method developed in the artificial conditions of Seurat's studio — could be applied to the direct outdoor observation of rural landscapes that had been Pissarro's primary concern. By 1887 he was discovering that the systematic approach could coexist with outdoor practice but required adaptation: the strict division of colour he applied to theoretical exercises in the studio became looser, more intuitive when he was painting in the field. The Philadelphia Museum's outstanding Pissarro collection, which includes major works from every phase of his career, holds this Neo-Impressionist summer landscape as evidence of the transitional experiment that would lead, within three years, to his definitive return to freer Impressionist handling.

The 1887 summer landscape shows a slightly more deliberate approach to colour structure than Pissarro's early Impressionist work — evidence of the influence of Seurat and Signac during this period of experiment. Individual strokes of complementary colour may be visible in passages of shadow and light that systematise the Impressionist colour intuition.