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Lot Essay
Camille Pissarro's abundant paintings of the French landscape confirm the persistence of rural subjects at every stage of the artist's career while their variety documents the transitions in both his creative process and his artistic goals. Art critic Théodore Duret heralded Pissarro's attention to landscape painting in an important letter to the artist in December 1873:
I persist in thinking that nature, with its rustic fields and its animals is that which corresponds best to your talent. You do not have the decorative feeling of Sisley, not the fantastic eye of Monet, but you do have what they don't, an intimate and profound feeling for nature, and a power in your brush that makes a good painting by you something with an absolute presence (R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven and London, 1990, p. 165).
The present work provides an extraordinary example of the artist's skillful contribution to the French landscape tradition and documents his unique position as an artistic link between the earlier achievements of the Barbizon School painters and the subsequent developments of artists as diverse as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Georges Seurat.
Pissarro most often painted the landscape near his home, and his most celebrated canvases are those of the 1870s which depict the areas around Pointoise, where he lived with his family from 1872 to 1882. In late 1882 and 1883, the Pissarro family lived briefly in Osny--a village eighty kilometers northwest of Pointoise and the subject of the present work--before relocating permanently to Eragny in 1884. This period in the early 1880s was, for Pissarro, one of transition in living environments as well as in subject matter and artistic techniques. Between 1881 and 1883 Pissarro's landscape production, so characteristic of his Pontoise period, dwindled in favor of monumental figure paintings which focused on market scenes and peasant labor. Eager to introduce an increased luminosity into his paintings, Pissarro embarked upon extensive pictorial experimentation which entailed a shift in practice. Not only did he engage in more studio work and increased drawing, he also began a series of works in other media, most notably tempera and gouache as well as printmaking, which he undertook with Edgar Degas, whom he declared in a letter of 1883 to be "without doubt, the greatest artist of our age." (ibid., p. 191). While the brushwork of the present painting exhibits a spectacular brilliance that may be attributed to Pissarro's contemporary experimentation, both its subject matter and composition recall the artist's paintings of his late Pontoise period, and resemble the screened landscapes that predominate during the late 1870s and early 1880s (fig. 1). As a counterpart to his earlier panoramas, these wooded sous-bois settings which fascinated the artist are more confined in space and restricted in both color and touch. In these paintings, architecture no longer plays a central role in the construction of the picture. Instead, trees and vegetation dominate, their curving forms introducing a rhythmic pattern to the painted surfaces. As Richard Brettell has asserted, ". . . the aesthetic roots of these works lie in the sous-bois of the Barbizon School, in the silvery screens of late Corot (fig. 2), and in the foliated late landscapes of Courbet (fig. 3). Pissarro, during the last Pointoise period observed civilisation from nature. The trees form a complex and partial pictorial barrier between the viewer and the humanized world with which he most clearly identifies" (ibid., p. 192).
Like many of Pissarro's landscapes from the early 1880s, the present work reveals a cluster of contradictions. The path on which the villagers walk opens at the foreground, seeming to invite the viewer into the scene, but the distribution of trees in the middle ground, as Brettell argues, prevents an easy entry. At the same time, the two trees at the center arch in near symmetry, but the imbalance between the sequence of thinner trunks on the left and the density of heavier foliage on the right, along with the gentle diagonal of the country path, undermine any sense of lateral equilibrium, or ordered nature in the composition. This dynamic effect is only intensified in the dance of staccato strokes which transition from rich shadow to striking illumination in their movement from left to right, both in the trees of the foreground and on the house in the background.
Exceptional for both its stunning brushwork, evident in Pissarro's volumetric and rhythmic treatment of this setting, and its structural juxtaposition of warm and cool colors, visible in the cool pinks of the architecture and the acidic greens of the leaves, this painting anticipates the similar execution of Cézanne's landscapes. The careful construction of such canvases, often studied from nature and meticulously reworked in the studio, confirms Pissarro's stature as an artist of supreme technical facility. In a remark written in 1920, but based on earlier notes of the 1890s and previous conversations with the artist, critic Georges Lecomte proclaims:
Certainly Camille Pissarro painted thousands of studies and hundreds of canvases after nature. But, from an early stage in his career as a painter passionately involved in research, most of this paintings were executed in the studio, with much deliberation, after studies made directly in front of the motif, with absolute keeping with the original emotion . . . Camille Pissarro abandons himself freely to the sensation, which he would never give up for any theory or any system. But he also constructs, he selects, he arranges" (ibid.,, p. 201).
(fig. 1) Camille Pissarro, Le Fond de L'Hermitage, Pontoise, 1879, Cleveland Museum of Art.
(fig. 2) Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, La Rive verte, 1860-1865, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 3) Gustave Courbet, Remise de chevreuils au ruisseau de Plaisir-Fontaine, 1866, Musée du Louvre.
I persist in thinking that nature, with its rustic fields and its animals is that which corresponds best to your talent. You do not have the decorative feeling of Sisley, not the fantastic eye of Monet, but you do have what they don't, an intimate and profound feeling for nature, and a power in your brush that makes a good painting by you something with an absolute presence (R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven and London, 1990, p. 165).
The present work provides an extraordinary example of the artist's skillful contribution to the French landscape tradition and documents his unique position as an artistic link between the earlier achievements of the Barbizon School painters and the subsequent developments of artists as diverse as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Georges Seurat.
Pissarro most often painted the landscape near his home, and his most celebrated canvases are those of the 1870s which depict the areas around Pointoise, where he lived with his family from 1872 to 1882. In late 1882 and 1883, the Pissarro family lived briefly in Osny--a village eighty kilometers northwest of Pointoise and the subject of the present work--before relocating permanently to Eragny in 1884. This period in the early 1880s was, for Pissarro, one of transition in living environments as well as in subject matter and artistic techniques. Between 1881 and 1883 Pissarro's landscape production, so characteristic of his Pontoise period, dwindled in favor of monumental figure paintings which focused on market scenes and peasant labor. Eager to introduce an increased luminosity into his paintings, Pissarro embarked upon extensive pictorial experimentation which entailed a shift in practice. Not only did he engage in more studio work and increased drawing, he also began a series of works in other media, most notably tempera and gouache as well as printmaking, which he undertook with Edgar Degas, whom he declared in a letter of 1883 to be "without doubt, the greatest artist of our age." (ibid., p. 191). While the brushwork of the present painting exhibits a spectacular brilliance that may be attributed to Pissarro's contemporary experimentation, both its subject matter and composition recall the artist's paintings of his late Pontoise period, and resemble the screened landscapes that predominate during the late 1870s and early 1880s (fig. 1). As a counterpart to his earlier panoramas, these wooded sous-bois settings which fascinated the artist are more confined in space and restricted in both color and touch. In these paintings, architecture no longer plays a central role in the construction of the picture. Instead, trees and vegetation dominate, their curving forms introducing a rhythmic pattern to the painted surfaces. As Richard Brettell has asserted, ". . . the aesthetic roots of these works lie in the sous-bois of the Barbizon School, in the silvery screens of late Corot (fig. 2), and in the foliated late landscapes of Courbet (fig. 3). Pissarro, during the last Pointoise period observed civilisation from nature. The trees form a complex and partial pictorial barrier between the viewer and the humanized world with which he most clearly identifies" (ibid., p. 192).
Like many of Pissarro's landscapes from the early 1880s, the present work reveals a cluster of contradictions. The path on which the villagers walk opens at the foreground, seeming to invite the viewer into the scene, but the distribution of trees in the middle ground, as Brettell argues, prevents an easy entry. At the same time, the two trees at the center arch in near symmetry, but the imbalance between the sequence of thinner trunks on the left and the density of heavier foliage on the right, along with the gentle diagonal of the country path, undermine any sense of lateral equilibrium, or ordered nature in the composition. This dynamic effect is only intensified in the dance of staccato strokes which transition from rich shadow to striking illumination in their movement from left to right, both in the trees of the foreground and on the house in the background.
Exceptional for both its stunning brushwork, evident in Pissarro's volumetric and rhythmic treatment of this setting, and its structural juxtaposition of warm and cool colors, visible in the cool pinks of the architecture and the acidic greens of the leaves, this painting anticipates the similar execution of Cézanne's landscapes. The careful construction of such canvases, often studied from nature and meticulously reworked in the studio, confirms Pissarro's stature as an artist of supreme technical facility. In a remark written in 1920, but based on earlier notes of the 1890s and previous conversations with the artist, critic Georges Lecomte proclaims:
Certainly Camille Pissarro painted thousands of studies and hundreds of canvases after nature. But, from an early stage in his career as a painter passionately involved in research, most of this paintings were executed in the studio, with much deliberation, after studies made directly in front of the motif, with absolute keeping with the original emotion . . . Camille Pissarro abandons himself freely to the sensation, which he would never give up for any theory or any system. But he also constructs, he selects, he arranges" (ibid.,, p. 201).
(fig. 1) Camille Pissarro, Le Fond de L'Hermitage, Pontoise, 1879, Cleveland Museum of Art.
(fig. 2) Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, La Rive verte, 1860-1865, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 3) Gustave Courbet, Remise de chevreuils au ruisseau de Plaisir-Fontaine, 1866, Musée du Louvre.