It took Pissarro two years to complete this painting, largely because he was experimenting with a a new time consuming technique called Pointillism - the image created with thousands of little dots and dabs of paint. The experiment seems to have been short-lived, and that's just fine. When we were in high school we performed science experiments. W.S. Merwin said, "Every garden is an experiment." Bakers and cooks experiment in the kitchen. On the other hand, experimenting with street drugs can be serious and dangerous.
Pissarro is looking out the window from the house his family rented in Eragny in 1884. Reading the numerous letters he wrote to his son, Lucien, we learn that Pissarro struggled with money problems, and often destitution, for much of his career. At this time he is selling his paintings for very low prices. Perhaps the family moved often, always looking for a more affordable place, and he painted the views from his windows of wherever he was living, because foreign travel would have been prohibitively expensive.
This painting is divided into, by my count, at least five or six horizontal planes. There is the tree right up front and center. Then there are the orderly vegetable beds and the wall with bushes opposite the courtyard with the woman feeding the chickens. The orange, clay tiled roof divides these two spaces. There is another plane of orchard trees, then another dividing line with a pasture of grazing cows. Then another row of flowering fruit trees beyond which is forest. Beyond that is the plane of the muted, colored sky. How wonderful!
I want to continually go deeper and beyond my understanding of what it means to live by faith, what it means to be a really alive and evolved human person, what it means to be spiritually awake and perceiving, what it means to love God and others.
Notice too that Pissarro has juxtaposed what are called warm and cool colors that evoke different emotions in the viewer. The red/brown and orange of the house eliciting feelings of warmth and comfort, while the cooler receding colors, blue/green/gray/violet, might evoke or invite an interior, pensive, even melancholic feeling.
