Apple Tree in the Meadow, Eragny

Apple trees in meadow grass were among the most intimate subjects in Pissarro's Éragny repertoire — trees he walked past daily, whose character changed with every season. This 1893 canvas at the Philadelphia Museum of Art shows a single tree standing in an open meadow, its form given the full attention usually reserved for portrait subjects. Pissarro had a habit of singling out individual trees for extended study, treating each one as a specific organism with its own character rather than as a generic type. The meadow setting — with its long grasses and flowers — provides a rich, varied foreground that grounds the tree in its actual ecological context.

The isolated tree composition required Pissarro to balance the tree's asymmetrical, spreading form against the open meadow surrounding it. His rendering of the apple tree combines attention to the branch structure visible through the canopy with the more impressionistic treatment of the leaf masses that constitute its outer surface.