Pissarro painting once owned by Bronwen Astor to enter National Gallery

A Camille Pissarro painting once owned by a leading player in the Profumo affair scandal is to enter the National Gallery’s collection after being accepted for the nation in lieu of inheritance tax.

Pissarro’s luminous Late Afternoon in our Meadow (1887) was owned by Bronwen Astor, who died in 2017. She inherited it from her husband, William Waldorf Astor, the 3rd Viscount Astor, heir to one of the biggest fortunes in the world.

Bill Astor owned the Cliveden estate and in 1961 hosted the gathering at which Christine Keeler and John Profumo met. He was also caught up in the ensuing scandal with Mandy Rice-Davies alleging in court that she had slept with him. Challenged over his denial of the affair she uttered the famous sentence: “He would, wouldn’t he?”

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The painting entering the National Gallery’s collection is one of a series by Pissarro featuring the meadow of his idyllic home in the Normandy village of Éragny, where he lived for the last two decades of his life.

It shines light on Pissarro’s changing methods, curators said. At the time he had fallen under the spell of the much younger painter Georges Seurat and had adopted his innovation of painting in small dots of pure colour. The National Gallery already has 11 Pissarros in its collection but this is the first that shows the artist’s temporary adoption of Seurat’s “divisionist” technique.

Christopher Riopelle, the gallery’s curator of post-1800 paintings, said the painting’s freshness and “superb state of preservation” allowed viewers to see Pissarro at a crucial moment of his career. “He slows down his usual rapid, improvisatory technique to compose pointillist compositions that record the fluctuations of light and atmosphere with minute, exquisite precision.”

The painting settles £1.1m of tax. Because its value exceeds the tax liability the National Gallery has contributed £400,000 from its own funds. It can be viewed in Room 44 from Friday, the 190th anniversary of Pissarro’s birth.