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Lot Essay
It was in the tiny village of Éragny northwest of Paris that Camille Pissarro settled with his family in 1884, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Capturing the rhythms of the local environment and community became central to his work during this period. On Monday mornings, the artist often joined his wife Julie, their children, and their housekeepers, to attend the market day in Gisors or Pontoise, towns further down the river Epte. While Julie stocked up on produce for the coming weeks, Pissarro would study the dynamics of this weekly communal event. The present work is a wonderfully vivid example of the subject of the marché, one of the defining themes in the artist’s œuvre.
The foreground protagonists of the scene - the grain sellers - are depicted with a striking sense of dignity; their rounded poses are composed, their faces contemplative. Portrayed against a hazy background of other market participants and rows of haystacks, they appear almost suspended in time, projecting a sense of stillness akin to that found in Raphael’s Renaissance portrayals of the Madonna. Equally, Marché au blé celebrates the visual qualities of the scene, with a whole range of vibrant tones, found even in the shadows cast by the haystacks and in the seams of the jute sacks, and carefully filling the entire surface of the composition. The work testifies to a moment when Pissarro turned away from the founding principles of Impressionism in the early 1880s in favour of exercising a greater mediation and structuring of reality. He devoted more of his attention to genre painting, increasingly engaging in studio work rather than following the precepts of painterly immediacy and working en plein air. He also explored a variety of techniques, including the exquisitely exemplified in the present work distemper, the matte quality of which allows for an enveloping luminosity.
Furthermore, Marché au blé constitutes an important country equivalent to the increasingly popular café scenes painted by other Impressionists such as Manet, Degas, or Renoir at the time. The act of depicting rural figures who in the Third Republic France did not belong to the canon of portraiture was revolutionary in itself. Portraying them not merely as land workers but as merchants, it acknowledges the prominent role played by women in agrarian societies and reflects Pissarro’s anarchist political outlook. As discussed by one of the chief authorities on the painter, Richard R. Brettel, the agricultural market was for Pissarro a figure of the “‘ideal’ market (…) [wherein] producers sell their commodities at a fair price (with haggling) directly to the consumers who need those commodities.” (Pissarro’s People, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2011, p. 219). Pissarro passionately believed that this structure had the potential of contributing to social and economic egalitarianism, unexploited labour, and a harmonisation of society.
The foreground protagonists of the scene - the grain sellers - are depicted with a striking sense of dignity; their rounded poses are composed, their faces contemplative. Portrayed against a hazy background of other market participants and rows of haystacks, they appear almost suspended in time, projecting a sense of stillness akin to that found in Raphael’s Renaissance portrayals of the Madonna. Equally, Marché au blé celebrates the visual qualities of the scene, with a whole range of vibrant tones, found even in the shadows cast by the haystacks and in the seams of the jute sacks, and carefully filling the entire surface of the composition. The work testifies to a moment when Pissarro turned away from the founding principles of Impressionism in the early 1880s in favour of exercising a greater mediation and structuring of reality. He devoted more of his attention to genre painting, increasingly engaging in studio work rather than following the precepts of painterly immediacy and working en plein air. He also explored a variety of techniques, including the exquisitely exemplified in the present work distemper, the matte quality of which allows for an enveloping luminosity.
Furthermore, Marché au blé constitutes an important country equivalent to the increasingly popular café scenes painted by other Impressionists such as Manet, Degas, or Renoir at the time. The act of depicting rural figures who in the Third Republic France did not belong to the canon of portraiture was revolutionary in itself. Portraying them not merely as land workers but as merchants, it acknowledges the prominent role played by women in agrarian societies and reflects Pissarro’s anarchist political outlook. As discussed by one of the chief authorities on the painter, Richard R. Brettel, the agricultural market was for Pissarro a figure of the “‘ideal’ market (…) [wherein] producers sell their commodities at a fair price (with haggling) directly to the consumers who need those commodities.” (Pissarro’s People, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2011, p. 219). Pissarro passionately believed that this structure had the potential of contributing to social and economic egalitarianism, unexploited labour, and a harmonisation of society.