The Artist's Garden at Eragny

The Artist's Garden at Éragny of 1898 at the National Gallery of Art shows Pissarro's domestic landscape at its most intimate: the garden of the house he had rented since 1884 and purchased in 1892, a space he had painted hundreds of times across fourteen years and which he knew with a familiarity unequalled in any other subject. By 1898 he was also simultaneously pursuing his Paris urban series — the Hôtel de Russie boulevard views date from this same year — and the garden paintings of Éragny functioned as a domestic counterpart to the urban ambition of those large-scale public compositions. The contrast between the garden's intimate, personal scale and the boulevard's panoramic sweep reflects the two poles of his late practice: private contemplation and public spectacle, rural intimacy and urban vitality, the domestic and the political. The NGA's holding of this Éragny garden painting alongside his urban views allows the breadth of his late production to be seen as a coherent whole rather than a series of separate campaigns.

By 1898 Pissarro had largely abandoned the strict Neo-Impressionist pointillism he had practised in the late 1880s, returning to a freer but informed Impressionist touch. The garden's varied greens are rendered with broken, mosaic-like strokes that show the lasting influence of Seurat's colour theory on his understanding of how colour mixing works in nature.