Young Peasant Having Her Coffee

In the 1880s, at a time when many of the original Impressionist painters had begun to pursue independent styles, Camille Pissarro actively worked to keep the group together. He persuaded Gustave Caillebotte and Claude Monet to take part in the seventh Impressionist exhibition, in 1882, and also displayed a number of his own paintings of peasant girls. Here the small brushstrokes, applied one next to the other and sometimes overlaid with dabs of thicker paint, result in an irregularly built-up surface, serving to integrate figure and setting and evoke the textures of the young woman’s wool clothing.