Pissarro’s experimental and innovative use of pastel modernized and revitalized the medium. Here, Pissarro combines tempera paint with pastel, crushed into a paint or paste, as well as applied dry. The result is a work whose effects seem to hover between painting and drawing—note the opaque fabrics and play of light on leaves. Like Jean-François Millet, whose work he admired, Pissarro lived in the countryside. A critic, writing in the 1880s, compared the two artists favorably, observing that “no one, since Millet, has observed and depicted the peasant with such powerful vigor and with such accurate and personal vision.”
