Soleil Couchant Au Valhermeil, Auvers-Sur-Oise 1880

Camille Pissarro made this landscape, Soleil Couchant Au Valhermeil, Auvers-Sur-Oise, using oil paint applied to canvas. Here, Pissarro is working with a completely conventional material, yet doing something radical with it. Notice how he has broken down the entire scene into hatched strokes of color, each one individually laid down. This shows an awareness of painting as a process, rather than a window onto the world. Pissarro’s Impressionist colleagues like Monet often addressed modern subjects, cityscapes, and fashionable life. But Pissarro’s focus was more agrarian. He repeatedly painted working people in the fields. He was interested in the political idea of labor, and the dignity of rural life. The application of paint is obviously laborious, but it captures the labor of the people who worked that land. By celebrating the process of painting, while at the same time valorizing working people, Pissarro invites us to rethink our categories of ‘high’ and ‘low.’