Interpretive Resource

The oldest of the Impressionists, Camille Pissarro was the only artist in the group whose work appeared in each of its eight exhibitions. In 1882, when Young Peasant Woman Drinking Her Café au Lait was included in the seventh show, critics praised Pissarro’s paintings for their rustic charm. A young woman attends earnestly to the task of capturing with her perfectly vertical spoon the last of her café au lait; she carefully tilts her cup toward her, so that its contents are hidden from our view. As in many of the artist’s compositions from this period, the space is compressed, with the figure in the immediate foreground positioned at a slightly oblique angle to the picture plane.

In the 1870s, Pissarro began to use coarse, patterned brushwork to integrate his figures with their surroundings. Here, he wove a web of roughly sketched, uniform strokes, rendering the play of light on the figure’s hair, face, and blouse in a great range of contrasting colors: olive green, grayish blue, beige. Through these thick, precisely applied dabs of paint—and without recourse to linear draftsmanship—Pissarro modeled his forms and gave volume to the spaces they occupy, thereby refining his earlier, gestural Impressionist technique.

Young Peasant Woman Drinking Her Café au Lait was received much less enthusiastically in London, where it was shown in 1883, than it had been in Paris. Disappointed, Pissarro wrote a reflective letter to his son: "I shall never do more careful, more finished work. Nevertheless, these paintings were regarded as uncouth in London. . . . The eye of the passerby is too hasty and sees only the surface—being in a hurry, he will not stop for me!"