Easter Mystery

Camille Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women (fig. 20) was first shown to the public in late January 1892. It was part of a wide-ranging exhibition of Pissarro’s past and recent work – the kind we would now call a retrospective – put on at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, in a fashionable shopping street just off the boulevard des Italiens. The catalogue for the show invited the visitor to look at Pissarro’s paintings chronologically, or with a sense of how paintings done in the previous few months …