The Gleaners (Les Glaneuses) by Camille Pissarro was created in 1889. The painting is in Kunstmuseum Basel. The size of the work is 65,5 x 81 cm and is made of oil on canvas.
In the mid-1880s, Camille Pissarro met the neo-impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and in the following years she dealt with so-called pointillism. “Les glaneuses” is a significant example of Pissarro’s neo-impressionist paintings. The painting shows poor agricultural workers who were allowed to collect the grain left behind after the harvest for their own use.
Working on the painting, for which preliminary studies are known (Pissarro/Durand-Ruel Snollaerts 2005, vol. 3, pp. 570–571), caused the artist some difficulty. In April 1888 he wrote from Éragny to his son Lucien lamenting his lack of models: “I’m at my table of ‘Glaneuses’, it’s giving me a lot of trouble… I’m lacking information… That’s always the big difficulty, I need models, I don’t yet know where to find them … It is only in Pontoise where I would find what I need, but I am not free to go there for that, and besides it would cost me too much, all the tricks that I have made and serve me continuously, I would need to renew them… what should I do?…” Read more in Kunstmuseum Basel (ge)
