Peasant woman looking after a cow, Osny

Peasant Woman Looking After a Cow, Osny of 1883, at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, was painted at Osny, a village near Pontoise where Pissarro worked before moving to Éragny. The subject — a woman minding cattle in a pasture — was among the most common sights in the Norman agricultural landscape and one Pissarro observed without idealisation, placing his figure in a specific field rather than a timeless pastoral setting. The Von der Heydt Museum's collection of French nineteenth-century art includes several important Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, and this Pissarro is among its most characteristic rural studies. The painting predates Pissarro's pointillist phase by two years, showing the freer more direct touch of his early 1880s work.

The technique here is notably free, with the cow, figure, and landscape all rendered in broad textured strokes without systematic colour division. Pissarro uses earth tones extensively for the field, punctuated by cooler greens of distant hedges, and the cow's mottled colouring is handled with observational confidence built from years of painting livestock in the field.