Summer Landscape, Eragny

The summer landscape at Éragny was a subject of comfortable familiarity by 1887, three years into Pissarro's residence in the village. The Philadelphia Museum of Art's canvas shows the summer at its height — deep greens, full foliage, the long light of afternoon over Norman fields. By 1887 Pissarro was also experimenting with Neo-Impressionism under Seurat's influence, and the more systematic approach to colour division that resulted may be detectable in the structural treatment of colour relationships in this canvas, even if its surface remains broadly Impressionist.

The 1887 summer landscape shows a slightly more deliberate approach to colour structure than Pissarro's early Impressionist work — evidence of the influence of Seurat and Signac during this period of experiment. Individual strokes of complementary colour may be visible in passages of shadow and light that systematise the Impressionist colour intuition.