The House of the Deaf Woman and the Belfry at Eragny

A neighbour's yard, a brick house, a church steeple, and a summer sun built from thousands of coloured dots. Pissarro painted it in 1886, at the height of his short love affair with pointillism, and then it vanished from public view for more than eighty years.

The story behind the painting

In the autumn of 1885 Camille Pissarro met Georges Seurat and was won over by his new Neo-Impressionism. Pissarro saw Seurat's principles, drawn from research on optics, as the logical next step of the Impressionism for which he himself was best known. He adopted the method over the protests of his colleagues and his dealer. This canvas was painted in the summer of 1886, when his enthusiasm was at its peak. It shows the yard of his neighbour in Eragny, the deaf woman of the title, with her house and the parish church behind. Pissarro was proud of it and sent it to several prestigious exhibitions in 1887.

What to look for

The canvas measures 65 by 81 cm. A brick house stands in the yard, and the steeple of the parish church rises behind it. The whole surface is made of small, even touches of paint, and the source calls it one of Pissarro's best pointillist images, with his most consistent brushwork and a fine grasp of Neo-Impressionist colour theory. In the shadows, deep green, violet and blue sit against dots of rose, orange and yellow, and together they rebuild the brilliant summer sun. Notice the frame too: it is a reproduction of the original, a compromise between Pissarro's preference for white and his dealer's insistence on gold.

Meaning and intent

For Pissarro the dots were not a trick but a way of making light itself. His great-grandson, the art historian Joachim Pissarro, wrote that in this painting he manages to blend respect for the new technical rules with freedom and spontaneity, and spoke of extraordinary light, dazzling colours and a brilliant energy that seems to radiate from the canvas. The method was slow and demanding, and by 1889 Pissarro had tired of it and returned to Impressionism. That is why the source calls this canvas triply precious: for its size, its quality, and its rarity within his work.

Legacy

The painting was not seen in public from 1918 onward and had never been shown in the United States. In 2002 a gift from an anonymous patron allowed the Indianapolis Museum of Art to acquire it from a private European collection. It was so little known that the dealer insisted on flying to Indianapolis with a colour photograph, so that chief curator Ellen Lee would not judge it from a black and white book plate; Lee remembers gasping when she saw it. She later travelled to the site for research and found the scene much as Pissarro had painted it, with the house and the church still standing. It hangs in the museum under accession number 2002.76.