Poplars, Éragny

The poplars at Éragny, painted in 1895 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, show Pissarro's sustained attention to the specific trees that lined the roads and field edges of his Norman village. Poplars — tall, slender, vibrating in the slightest breeze — were one of Impressionism's signature trees: Monet had painted them obsessively in 1891, and Pissarro brought his own structural sensibility to the same subject four years later. His poplars stand as vertical accents in the flat Norman landscape, their slim profiles creating a rhythmic counterpoint to the horizontal earth and sky.

The vertical thrust of poplar trunks against horizontal bands of field and sky creates a compositional tension that Pissarro exploits throughout the canvas. He renders the poplars' delicate, trembling foliage with rapid, upward strokes of varied greens, while the sky is handled with more sustained, horizontal paint to contrast with the trees' movement.