This is a rather remarkable painting. Notice again the grass and how it is created by thousands of little, individual strokes, and how that grass and the little girl's skirt seem to blend in together, so that we're not sure which is which. The girl isn't just harmonized with nature, but she's rooted or utterly grounded in it.
The young mother forms a horizontal line while the trees on the little ridge above form vertical lines, as if the mother and child are locked into nature. One author, commenting on Pissarro's rural figures says: "They stand in the splendor of another world." We belong in nature. Do we realize this about ourselves?
The young mother forms a horizontal line while the trees on the little ridge above form vertical lines, as if the mother and child are locked into nature. One author, commenting on Pissarro's rural figures says: "They stand in the splendor of another world." We belong in nature. Do we realize this about ourselves?
Floods of great destructive power are more frequent each year as we pave over the absorbing ground with concrete and asphalt, and the water has no where to go. Here in Pissarro's countryside, the ground is exposed, soft, alive and splendid.
We might appreciate too that unlike his contemporaries, Pissarro (who was fifty-two when he painted this picture) never depicts women in erotic poses. They wear homespun clothes, which while sometimes fitted, are not intended to be provocative. Indeed, it is said that one of the primary aims of 18th and 19th century painters of rural women, was to make them appear erotically available for urban viewers.
Instead, Pissarro depicts women, especially young women, as "purposeful, strong, self-determined and evidently happy in their settings." Here a young mother is comfortable and relaxed in the company of a little child who is enjoying her snack. Not a few people in our harried culture are losing these kinds of life-sustaining, life-enriching moments.
