Camille Pissarro

Beginning in 1896 and continuing until his death in 1903, Camille Pissarro collaborated with his son Lucien on a project titled "Travaux des Champs," for which the Morgan drawing is presumably a study. In its various conceptions, the project aimed to illustrate peasant labor in the French countryside and to record the changing seasons in the manner of medieval Labors of the Months and almanac illustrations. Rather than the physical difficulties of the harvest, Pissarro hoped to capture the communal spirit of peasant labor. But owing to Lucien's residence in London, Camille's preoccupation with other projects, and difficulties in finding an author and publisher, among other factors, Travaux des Champs was never completed. Though a number of the drawings were translated into prints published by Lucien Pissarro in Emily Moselly's "La Charrue d'erable" (Paris 1912), as well as the portfolio Travaux des champs, Ière Série, published at the Vale Press by Charles Ricketts in 1895, they serve as a pale reflection of the project's original conception (Brettell and Lloyd, 1980, p. 66)
Though Travaux des Champs shares much of its iconography with J.F. Millet, who produced a portfolio of ten illustrations under the same title in 1853, Pissarro's Peasant Women Around a Cart is presented in a more abstract style characterized by heavy, rigid outlines. Here, Millet's sense of monumentality gives way to the miniaturized scale of the figural groupings, owing a great deal to Japanese prints in general and Hokusai's Manga in particular (Brettell and Lloyd, 1980, p. 68). The present sheet is strikingly similar in subject and style to a red and black chalk drawing in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, picturing Figures Picking Grapes, most notably in the group of figures and horse cart on the far left of the composition (Brettel and Lloyd, 1980: cat. 309, p. 203). In their discussion of the Ashmolean sheet, Brettell and Lloyd discuss an “elaborate compositional study for the cart and surrounding figures,” which included four additional figures in front of the cart that are omitted in the larger composition, which is presumably a reference to the Morgan study.