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Lot Essay
Petite bonne flamande dite ‘La Rosa’ is one of a small group of paintings that Camille Pissarro painted in 1896, which depict a young Flemish girl, Rosa, who was at the time the Pissarro family’s housemaid. ‘I’m doing a few figure paintings based on la Rosa’ (letter from Pissarro to L. Pissarro, in J. Pissarro & C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro, Catalogue critique des peintures, vol. III, Paris, 2005, p. 694), Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien on 4 December 1895 from Paris. A few weeks later, on 15 January 1896, he wrote again, telling his son that he had, ‘finished four size-ten and fifteen canvases based on Rosa’ (ibid.,); the present work is one of the aforementioned ‘size-ten’ canvases. Here, Rosa is seated within an interior, her hands clasped together as she gazes into the distance as if deeply absorbed in thought. The white bonnet that she wears serves to heighten the soft pink tones of her rosy cheeks, accentuating her youthful appearance. Included in Pissarro’s critically acclaimed breakthrough one-man exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in the same year that it was painted, Petite bonne flamande dite ‘La Rosa’ was singled out by the critic François Thiébault-Sisson, who remarked, ‘The Petite bonne flamande seated in an interior, in front of a door, is a superbly honest piece. The freshness of its feeling combines with the masculine accuracy of its lines, the appeal of the colours, to produce a delightful fragrance of rustic gracefulness’ (F. Thiébault-Sisson, ‘L’exposition Pissarro’, in Le Temps, 1896, quoted in ibid., p. 701).
With its finely rendered surface of short, staccato brushstrokes, Petite bonne flamande dite ‘La Rosa’ exemplifies the distinctive pointillist-inspired style that Pissarro had developed. Having witnessed the pointillist works of the movement’s pioneers Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, Pissarro went on to forge his own distinctive technique that blended the lightness and freedom of his impressionist mode of painting with the colour theories and divisionist technique of Pointillism. Using a softly coloured palette of greens, blues and golden yellows and oranges, Pissarro has captured a delicate play of light throughout the composition, an effect that conjures a sense of quiet tranquillity throughout this intimate interior scene.
With its finely rendered surface of short, staccato brushstrokes, Petite bonne flamande dite ‘La Rosa’ exemplifies the distinctive pointillist-inspired style that Pissarro had developed. Having witnessed the pointillist works of the movement’s pioneers Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, Pissarro went on to forge his own distinctive technique that blended the lightness and freedom of his impressionist mode of painting with the colour theories and divisionist technique of Pointillism. Using a softly coloured palette of greens, blues and golden yellows and oranges, Pissarro has captured a delicate play of light throughout the composition, an effect that conjures a sense of quiet tranquillity throughout this intimate interior scene.