In his review of the 1874 Impressionist exhibition, written in the form of a dialogue between an academic landscape painter (Joseph Vincent) and the author, Louis Leroy wrote: "Assuming the most naive expression, I led him before Pissarro's Ploughed Field. At the sight of this formidable landscape, the good fellow thought that the lenses of his glasses were dirty. He wiped them carefully and put them back on his nose. 'In the name of Michallon! [an early 19th-century French landscape painter],' he said, 'What's that?' 'You see, it's hoarfrost on deeply plowed fields.' 'Those are furrowà That is hoarfrost?... But those are palette scrapings spread evenly on dirty canvas. It has neither head nor tail, neither top nor bottom, neither front nor back.' 'Maybe, but the impression is there.' 'Well, it's a 'funny kind of impression' (Louis Leroy, "Exposition des Impressionnistes," Le Charivari, April 25, 1874).

Despite its maliciousness, this passage sums up quite well what Pissarro was trying to achieve in this picture. It would be difficult to find a landscape more commonplace, more devoid of inherent charm, but equally difficult to find one more suited to a delicate and diverse interpretation of the shimmering light on the ground and in the air. Here only light is important; one forgets the deliberate neglect of subject matter. "This light, this color... Pissarro absorbs them in and then imbues the sky, the earth, and the peasants with them... the uncontrollable vibration of the haze," wrote F. Fagus in his symbolist interpretation of Pissarro's style (La Revue Blanche, 1898).

Because of the influence of Turner, whose work he had seen in London in 1871, and because he and Monet had been working together, by 1874 Pissarro had completely eliminated browns and blacks from his palette and was mixing color directly on the canvas. Looked at closely, such a picture is only a series of irregular, illegible strokes. It recalls what Diderot said about Chardin, "We understand nothing about this magic; these are thick layers of color applied one over the other, the effects of which intermingle above and below. In other instances, one would think that a vapor had been blown onto the canvas, or that it had been sprayed with a light foam... Draw near, and everything blurs, flattens and dissolves; step back, and everything forms and comes together again" (Diderot, Salon de 1763).

The other Impressionists sought the play of light and reflections mainly in the atmosphere and on water, but Pissarro preferred to find them on the earth. The earthy character of Pissarro's art is often correctly emphasized; he concentrated on rural Ile-de-France subjects, and only later in his development included purely urban landscapes of Paris and Dieppe. He and Gauguin proceeded through life along quite different paths: Gauguin was born on the rue Notre-Dame de Lorette in the center of Paris and thought only about running away, far from the streets of the city; Pissarro, on the other hand, who was born on a faraway island in the Danish Caribbean, was only comfortable in the countryside of the Ile-de-France or along the Avenue de l'Opéra.

Inventory number:

RF 1972 27

Provenance:

Jean-Baptiste Faure collection

1919, in the Durand-Ruel collection, deposited by Faure in 1900 and purchased, jointly by Durand-Ruel New York and Georges Petit, from Mrs. Maurice Faure, February 1, 1919 Georges Petit Gallery

Eduardo Mollard collection

1972, accepted by the State as a bequest from Enriqueta Alsop, in the name of Doctor Eduardo Mollard for the Jeu de Paume Museum

1972, attributed to the Louvre Museum, Paris

From 1972 to 1986, Louvre Museum, Jeu de Paume gallery, Paris

1986, assigned to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris