Peasants' houses, Eragny

Peasants' Houses, Éragny of 1887, held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, is one of several views Pissarro made of the village houses during his pointillist years. The subject — a cluster of modest agricultural buildings set within the Norman landscape — allowed Pissarro to explore the application of his divisionist technique to architectural surfaces and their relationship to surrounding vegetation. The AGNSW holds a significant collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work that includes this painting as an example of Pissarro's systematic engagement with colour theory. The 1887 date places the work at the height of his pointillist experiment, when his commitment to Seurat's methods was most disciplined.

The pointillist application is visible throughout: wall surfaces, roof tiles, grass, and sky are all built from small uniform touches of adjacent colour. Pissarro's choice of rural architecture tests the technique's suitability for hard-edged forms, and the slight softening this produces gives the buildings a quality of being seen in particular light conditions rather than depicted in an abstract manner.