The Harvest

Figures work in a wheat field that covers the entire horizontal canvas. The horizon line in the distance is placed one quarter of the way down from the top of the painting. The painting presents a scene of wheat harvesting in Pontoise, a quiet village on the outskirts of Paris. By the 1840s this area was connected to Paris by train and it became the home for many young painters. The Impressionist painter Pissarro was one of these resident painters, setting up his studio in the area twice, in 1866-68 and then again in 1872-82. This work was created near the end of Pissarro's second residence in Pontoise, and it was exhibited in the 7th Impressionist exhibition. Several of Pissarro's characteristic features of this period are apparent in this work. One is the handling of the figures. Up until that time figures were simply small, added elements to a composition, but in the 1880s they came to play a major role in his works. At time he created close-up images of either a single figure or a few of them, carefully depicting them with a psychological understanding.In this canvas, two figures, a farm woman holding a sheaf of harvested wheat in the left foreground and a woman bent over next to her, are elements that had never before been seen in Pissarro's works. In this regard Pissarro distanced himself from the Impressionist world that was essentially naturalist and objective even in nature, and brought a new form of dynamism to his compositions.Numerous watercolor and chalk preparatory works for this painting remain and we can imagine how Pissarro spent many hours in his studio carefully creating this work. This method also distances itself from the "Impressionistic" production method that is frequently a case of works painted in a relatively short period of time. (Source: Masterpieces of the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2009, cat. no.81)