Young Peasant Girls Resting in the Fields near Pontoise

Young Peasant Girls Resting in the Fields near Pontoise, painted in 1882, belongs to Pissarro extended investigation of the rural working class around Pontoise, the town northwest of Paris where he lived and worked from 1866 to 1883. The painting depicts two young women taking a break from fieldwork, their postures of rest and exhaustion rendered with the dignity and sympathy that characterize Pissarro treatment of the rural poor. Pissarro was the only Impressionist who consistently painted the rural working class. Where Monet painted gardens and Renoir painted bourgeois leisure, Pissarro painted peasants - not as sentimental genre subjects but as working people engaged in the real labor of agriculture. His commitment to this subject was both artistic and political: Pissarro was an anarchist, and his paintings of the rural poor embody his belief in the dignity of labor and the value of communal life. The painting most Pissarro-like quality is its structural treatment of the landscape. The fields, organized into broad planes of green and gold, create a geometric framework that supports the figures without overwhelming them. Cezanne, who worked alongside Pissarro in Pontoise in 1872, admired this constructive quality and adopted it as the foundation of his own art. The relationship between Pissarro and Cezanne - master and student, then colleagues - is one of the most important artistic partnerships in the history of modern painting.

Pissarro peasant paintings established the rural working class as a major subject for Impressionism and demonstrated that the most advanced formal methods could be applied to the most humble subjects. His influence on Cezanne, Gauguin, and the Neo-Impressionists was direct and acknowledged by the artists themselves.

This painting captures Pissarro most political and most beautiful quality: the respect he brings to the lives of working people. His peasant girls, resting in a field that stretches to the horizon, are not sentimental figures but real workers, whose exhaustion and whose rest are equally worthy of the most ambitious painting.