Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook

Camille Pissarro · 1895

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

73 × 92 cm (28 1/2 × 36 in.); Framed: 95 × 113.1 × 12.4 cm (37 3/8 × 44 1/2 × 4 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook is a quietly tender work — intimate in scale, gentle in mood, and entirely characteristic of Pissarro's lifelong devotion to the unhurried rhythms of rural French life. By 1895, Pissarro had passed through his Pointillist phase, influenced by Georges Seurat in the late 1880s, and returned to a looser, more instinctive brushwork that suited his temperament far better. Where his Impressionist peers were drawn to leisure and spectacle, Pissarro kept returning to peasant women at work or rest — figures embedded in the landscape rather than posed against it. His touch here is soft and dappled, the light filtered through foliage in the way he had spent decades learning to see and render honestly. Pissarro had developed a persistent eye condition by the late 1880s that made outdoor painting increasingly difficult, pushing him toward more sheltered, meditative compositions — which may partly explain the closeness and stillness this painting carries. Held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the original rewards careful looking in person. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is made to the same dimensions on linen canvas, mixing pigments by hand to match Pissarro's characteristic palette of muted greens, warm earth tones, and soft afternoon light.