Two Young Peasant Women

Two Young Peasant Women of 1890, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was painted in the year Pissarro finally abandoned the rigorous pointillist method he had pursued since 1885. The transition back toward freer brushwork is visible in the handling's greater spontaneity compared to his mid-decade canvases, though the colour remains carefully divided into related touches. The two figures, seated together in a field, are rendered with the directness Pissarro brought to all his rural subjects — specific people in a specific place, rather than generic peasant types. The Metropolitan acquired this work as part of its systematic representation of the Impressionist generation, and it sits comfortably among the museum's French nineteenth-century paintings as an example of Pissarro's late figure style.

The painting shows Pissarro transitioning away from strict pointillism: strokes are more varied in direction and size than in his 1887–1888 canvases, approaching the hatching and cross-hatching technique he developed in the early 1890s. The figures' garments are built from overlapping touches of blue, white, and grey that describe fabric folds through colour rather than line.