A peasant woman trudges through the snow, her back to the viewer, arms taut with the weight of two buckets. This painting combines Pissarro’s sympathy for rural labor with his interest in winter landscapes, a subject he returned to again and again, delighting in the infinitely varied shades of white, from pearl pink to ice blue. He likely painted this scene from the window of his studio—a converted barn in the tiny village of Éragny, fifty miles outside Paris—where he worked directly from nature while protected from the elements.

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