Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

Etudes des paysannes is closely related to a study of four women that is one of eight drawings from a dismembered sketchbook in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Of similar dimensions to the Ashmolean drawings, the present sheet may have come from the same sketchbook, which appears to have been mainly used by Pissarro in Montfoucault and Pontoise between 1874 and 1879.
The study of a seated woman at the lower left of the present lot might have been later used by the artist to draw a similar figure which is at the centre of the painting Paysanne assise, circa 1883 (see J. Pissarro & C. Durand-Ruel Snollœrts, vol. II, Paris, 2005, no. 709, p. 473).