Sale 2532 - 19th & 20th Century Prints & Drawings, March 5, 2020

A year later he met the artists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac (see lots 77 and 78) and soon adopted the Pointillist style during the late 1880s. In 1886 at the Impressionist Exhibition, Pissarro exhibited a group of paintings, along with Seurat, Signac and his son Lucien Pissarro, albeit in a separate room from the other Impressionist works. This was a significant and courageous shift in styles for the artist, then in his mid-50s, who had seen only limited commercial success with his Impressionist works. Nevertheless, Pissarro eventually abandoned Pointillism and Neo-Impressionism, claiming its system was too artificial and technical, and reverted to his earlier style. This shift back to his Impressionist roots, as well as the inf luence of the Barbizon masters, is evident in this simple etched scene of peasants at rest on a Sunday afternoon in a warm, sunlit setting. Pissarro may have had an earlier painting in mind, Les jeunes filles de paysans, that he had made in Pontoise in 1882, when he created this etching. Delteil 99. [5,000/8,000]