Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook

A peasant woman sits on a grassy bank and dips her bare feet into the dappled water of a sunlit brook, the foliage and stream broken into soft, flickering touches of color. Camille Pissarro, the steady elder Impressionist, returns here to the rural figure in a moment of simple, sensuous ease. Now in the Art Institute of Chicago, Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook shows his late style - warm, luminous, and tender - the dignity of country life and the play of light on water rendered with the gentle humanity that marked all his work.