Pissarro's Pointillism: distancing himself even more from "free sensation"
For Pissarro, the movement of Impressionism was already past its time in 1883, less than ten years after the first Impressionist exhibit of 1874: "Impressionism was in reality nothing other than a theory of perception, without forgetting fantasy, freedom and greatness - in a word, all the things that make art great." (qtd Becker, 102). The newer movement, one favored by younger artists, was Pointillism: what Becker calls a "way of painting using spots of unmixed colors, which were dotted individually over the almost which ground, creating the impression of a shimmering pictorial surface." (Becker, 102) Thus, rather than attempting to capture a brief "sensation", an ephemeral "impression", proponents of Pointillism favored a physiological and psychological interpretation of perception, where the latter became a complex process between the picture and the viewer.
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Pissarro was clearly attracted to this movement. In early 1885, he met Georges Seurat, the driving force behind the new movement, and was immediately taken by the latter's compositions. In a letter to Durand-Ruel in late 1886, Pissarro describes his new aim: "To seek a modern synthesis of methods based on science, that in turn is based on M.E. Chevreul's theory of color...To substitute optical mixture for a mixture of pigments. In other words: the breaking up of tones into their constituents. For optical mixture stirs up more intense luminosities than does mixture of pigments." (qtd Becker, 102). Subsequently, between 1888 and 1890, Pissarro produced a group of pictures showing women working in the fields, in which he employed the new Pointillist technique. An example of this is the fan-design Peasants Planting Pea-sticks (1890), which was then used to create an oil painting of the same name (1891)..bmp)
Although Pissarro never became one of the leaders of the Pointillist movement, he made a significant contribution to it. He even became so caught up in it that he seems to have quite lost his free, natural style – his sensation libre – which the French naturalist author Emile Zola had so admired, in favor of the cold and calculated method of the point. View from my Window, Eragny (1888), clearly reflects this change. The painting is quite mathematical: the colors are systematically divided, and the foreground with the almost rectangular red roof and the landscape divided into practically equal-depth bands give the impression that the painting is composed of a combination of countless dots of color and short, parallel lines. 
Thus, Pissarro evidently seems to have foregone, for a while, his love for the free nature of sensation libre, of true Impressionism, in order to achieve purity of tone.
Ultimately, however, Pissarro never truly embraced Pointillism. He was perfectly conscious of its faults, stating in a letter to his son Lucien on 6 September 1888: “I think continually of some way of painting without the dot. I hope to achieve this but I have not been able to solve the problem of dividing the pure tone without harness…How can one combine the purity and simplicity of the dot with the fullness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity and freshness of sensation postulated by our impressionist art? This is the question which preoccupies me, for the dot is meager, lacking in body, diaphanous, more monotonous than simple, even the Seurats, particularly in the Seurats…” (qtd Becker, 104). Pissarro subsequently returned to his previous Impressionist technique. Thus, Pissarro’s brief move away from Impressionism and towards Pointillism, away from free sensation and towards a more scientific method of painting, was not much more than an experiment, a brief flirt; indeed, quite literally, a brush with the unknown.