The Artist's Garden at Eragny

Pissarro moved to Éragny-sur-Epte in Normandy in 1884 and remained there until his death in 1903, making the village's garden and surrounding orchards his primary subject in these later decades. The 1898 painting of his own garden at the National Gallery of Art belongs to this final creative period, when he was also working on his Neo-Impressionist series of views from urban hotel windows. The artist's garden — with its domestic fruit trees, kitchen vegetables, and familiar paths — provided a subject of intimate familiarity that he approached with the same analytical attention he brought to grander landscape subjects.

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.