Young Peasant Girls Resting in the Fields near Pontoise

Young Peasant Girls Resting in the Fields near Pontoise at the National Gallery of Art, painted in 1882, shows two young women at rest in a summer field — a subject that Pissarro treated with the same democratic directness he brought to all his agricultural subjects. By 1882 he was at the end of his Pontoise decade and about to transition to the Éragny period, and his figure-in-landscape compositions from this year have a particular confidence and freedom that reflects his complete mastery of the Pontoise terrain. The NGA's canvas shows the figures without sentimentality or idealization: they are young rural workers taking a rest, their bodies substantial and particular rather than prettified or romanticized. Contemporaries including Jules Bastien-Lepage were producing large-scale peasant figure paintings for the Salon that presented rural workers in a more dramatic, stagey manner; Pissarro's version is deliberately smaller in scale and quieter in effect, the figures simply present in their landscape without theatrical gesture or narrative pretension.

The figures are placed in a sunny field, the high horizon giving maximum space to the sky. Pissarro uses his early 1880s technique — varied, directional brushwork that renders grass texture, sky, and the women's dresses in different stroke patterns. The figures have a solidity and weight unusual in Impressionist figurework.