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Lot Essay
Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts will include this painting in the forthcoming Pissarro catalogue raisonné being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.
Camille Pissarro and his family had been living in Pontoise since 1866, and the diverse motifs in and around this small barge-port town on the Oise River had shaped the artist's landscape painting during the early evolution of Impressionism. However, as early as 1871, Pissarro driven by strained economic circumstances, had been looking for another locale in which to live and work at least part of the year. Ludovic Piette, his closest friend, owned property around Montfoucault, a small hamlet near Mayenne, about seventy-four kilometers northwest of Le Mans. In a letter to his friend, the art critic Théodore Duret, dated 20 October 1874, Camille Pissarro wrote: "My dear Duret, I want to tell you that I am departing for the country with my friend Piette and I will not be back until January. I am going there to study the people and the animals of the true country" (J.B. Bailly-Herzberg, op.cit., p. 95).
Pissarro used the farm at Montfoucault and its surroundings as subject in his paintings over the course of three successive autumn visits until Piette's death in 1878. Whereas Pontoise was a provincial town, situated at a busy commercial crossroads not far from Paris, Montfoucault was a full day's train ride from Paris, and relatively remote and isolated. The farms were small, with their fields enclosed by hedgerows--there were neither the broad vistas nor any of the variety that one could observe in the landscape around Pontoise. In Pontoise he had to travel to the environs of the town to observe farm folk (who were mostly transient day laborers) at work, but in Montfoucault, for the first time, he was living among the rural peasantry, with their age-old attachment to the land. These new surroundings and the close presence of his neighbors compelled Pissarro to deal with the figure in a new and direct manner. He pondered the advice of Duret, who in December 1873 told the painter: "I still believe that rustic nature, with its fields and animals, is what best suits your talent. You do not have Sisley's decorative feeling, or Monet's fantastic eye, but you have what they do not have: an intimate and deep feeling for nature as well as a powerful brushstroke, so that a beautiful picture by you is something with an absolute presence. Go your own way, towards rural nature: thus you will explore a new avenue, and will go further and higher than any master" (quoted in J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p. 143).
In a letter dated 11 December 1874, Pissarro confided to Duret: "I have worked quite a lot here, I have started working on figures and animals. I have several projects of genre paintings. I am timidly experimenting with this branch of art, so much illustrated by first-rank artists: this is rather bold, I fear that it might be a complete flop" (ibid., p. 146). No doubt Pissarro was thinking of Jean-François Millet whose iconic images of rural peasant women had previously challenged the notion of acceptable subject matter.
As Richard Bretell notes: "the sheer physicality of form--its weight, mass and proximity--became Pissarro's overriding concern in the Montfoucault period and that reality was expressed by the material presence of paint itself. Pissarro layered paint on the surface to suggest mass and weight in a manner matched in the period only by Cézanne" (R. Bretell, Pissarro and Pontoise, The Painter in a Landscape, London, 1990, p. 165). In La Mère Jolly, the large scale and central position of the figure communicate her nobility despite her humble station in life.
Camille Pissarro and his family had been living in Pontoise since 1866, and the diverse motifs in and around this small barge-port town on the Oise River had shaped the artist's landscape painting during the early evolution of Impressionism. However, as early as 1871, Pissarro driven by strained economic circumstances, had been looking for another locale in which to live and work at least part of the year. Ludovic Piette, his closest friend, owned property around Montfoucault, a small hamlet near Mayenne, about seventy-four kilometers northwest of Le Mans. In a letter to his friend, the art critic Théodore Duret, dated 20 October 1874, Camille Pissarro wrote: "My dear Duret, I want to tell you that I am departing for the country with my friend Piette and I will not be back until January. I am going there to study the people and the animals of the true country" (J.B. Bailly-Herzberg, op.cit., p. 95).
Pissarro used the farm at Montfoucault and its surroundings as subject in his paintings over the course of three successive autumn visits until Piette's death in 1878. Whereas Pontoise was a provincial town, situated at a busy commercial crossroads not far from Paris, Montfoucault was a full day's train ride from Paris, and relatively remote and isolated. The farms were small, with their fields enclosed by hedgerows--there were neither the broad vistas nor any of the variety that one could observe in the landscape around Pontoise. In Pontoise he had to travel to the environs of the town to observe farm folk (who were mostly transient day laborers) at work, but in Montfoucault, for the first time, he was living among the rural peasantry, with their age-old attachment to the land. These new surroundings and the close presence of his neighbors compelled Pissarro to deal with the figure in a new and direct manner. He pondered the advice of Duret, who in December 1873 told the painter: "I still believe that rustic nature, with its fields and animals, is what best suits your talent. You do not have Sisley's decorative feeling, or Monet's fantastic eye, but you have what they do not have: an intimate and deep feeling for nature as well as a powerful brushstroke, so that a beautiful picture by you is something with an absolute presence. Go your own way, towards rural nature: thus you will explore a new avenue, and will go further and higher than any master" (quoted in J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p. 143).
In a letter dated 11 December 1874, Pissarro confided to Duret: "I have worked quite a lot here, I have started working on figures and animals. I have several projects of genre paintings. I am timidly experimenting with this branch of art, so much illustrated by first-rank artists: this is rather bold, I fear that it might be a complete flop" (ibid., p. 146). No doubt Pissarro was thinking of Jean-François Millet whose iconic images of rural peasant women had previously challenged the notion of acceptable subject matter.
As Richard Bretell notes: "the sheer physicality of form--its weight, mass and proximity--became Pissarro's overriding concern in the Montfoucault period and that reality was expressed by the material presence of paint itself. Pissarro layered paint on the surface to suggest mass and weight in a manner matched in the period only by Cézanne" (R. Bretell, Pissarro and Pontoise, The Painter in a Landscape, London, 1990, p. 165). In La Mère Jolly, the large scale and central position of the figure communicate her nobility despite her humble station in life.