White Frost

A peasant trudges across a frost-whitened field carrying a bundle of sticks, the furrows casting long shadows streaked with broken blue, violet, and gold. Camille Pissarro built the scene from flecks of pure color laid side by side, so that critics complained it looked like nothing - mere palette-scrapings on canvas. Shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, White Frost was mocked then and is treasured now. In the Musee d'Orsay, it stands as a defining early Impressionist landscape, ordinary rural labor transfigured by the close, daring study of colored light.