Pissarro, like Monet and Renoir, sought to move away from the strict criteria that had governed their approach to Impressionism as the decade of the 1870's drew to a close. Very soon his style underwent a number of changes:

Firstly, regarding the compositions, there is less emphasis on
recession and spatial depth. The basic elements - foreground,
middle distance and background - tend to be flattened, so that
the design is read upwards as a series of horizontal bands.
Secondly, Pissarro's whole concept of the human figure changes,
disproving totally the contention so widely and traditionally
held that he is solely a landscape painter. Both the drawings
he made during these years and the prominence accorded the figure in his paintings attest a fresh assesment of the importance of
the human figure in a composition. Where before, during the
1870s, the figures are carefully integrated with their
surroundings, by the beginning of the 1880s it is the figures
who dominate the compositions, often at the expense of the
backgrounds. This was a slow process in the development of
Pissarro's style and was probably nurtured by Degas. Thirdly,
Pissarro's technique continues to evolve in favour of small,
evenly distributed, and heavily loaded brushstrokes sometimes
applied in parallel. These strokes are the equivalent of
Cézanne's constructivist brushstrokes. The palette also
becomes much more diverse as the artist applies smaller patches
of pure colour. (C. Lloyd and A. Distell, Camille Pissarro
1830-1903, London, 1980, p. 116).