Peasant Women under the Trees at Moret

Peasant Women under the Trees at Moret of 1902 was painted at the small town on the Seine where Alfred Sisley had lived and worked since 1880 and where he died in January 1899. Pissarro visited Moret three years after his friend's death, and the visit carries an elegiac dimension: the same landscape, the same medieval gates and canal reflections that Sisley had made his primary subject, now observed by the surviving member of the Impressionist founding generation. Moret-sur-Loing stood at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where Pissarro and Sisley had both begun their careers in the Barbizon tradition decades earlier, and returning to it in 1902 was a return to the landscape tradition from which they had both emerged. The peasant women under trees continued Pissarro's lifelong commitment to depicting agricultural labour with dignity — a commitment rooted in his anarchist politics and his genuine admiration for those who worked the land. At seventy-two, he was producing work of undiminished quality, his late rural subjects combining the urban series colour sophistication with the direct landscape observation that had been his original contribution to Impressionism.

Pissarro's treatment of figures in a landscape at this date combines his urban series colour sophistication with the more earthy, varied palette of his rural subjects. The dappled light through the trees creates a natural broken-colour pattern that he builds through varied short strokes of green, ochre, and warm shadow.