Spring Pasture

Spring Pasture belongs to Pissarro's Éragny period, paintings of the meadows and pastures around his permanent home in Normandy that record the agricultural life of the Seine valley with consistent attention across nearly twenty years. The spring pastorals — new grass, young animals, the return of warmth — offered him the same seasonal renewal subject that the apple blossom paintings had provided at Pontoise, now observed from the more intimate vantage of a man in his permanent home territory. These Éragny pastorals are quieter and more domestic in feeling than the Pontoise work.

Spring greens are handled in Pissarro's most luminous, aerated touch — small strokes of fresh yellow-green, grass-green, and pale blue-green building a vibrant surface. The sky, a clear spring blue, is rendered with larger, more sweeping strokes that contrast with the busy surface of the pasture below. Cows or other animals in the middle ground provide scale and a warm colour accent within the predominantly cool-green field.