.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Christopher Lloyd and Joachim Pissarro have kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Femme étendant du linge, Éragny was executed in 1890 in Eragny, a small village near Gisors, where Pissarro had rented a large house from 1884 and relates to an oil of the same title, executed three years earlier (P&V 717). It was around this time that figure subjects became a more important motif in Pissarro's work, and he began to paint a series of works depicting peasants going about their daily tasks in the countryside. The present work and the oil of 1877 both belong to this series, which also includes such masterpieces as Femme plantant des rames (P&V 772) or La causette (P&V 792) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Christopher Lloyd has commented that, 'like Monet at Giverny, Pissarro's examination of the rural spectacles that surrounded him was intense. He luxuriated in the changing temporal conditions and found the fogs, frosts and snow of winter or the vibrant warmth and lush verdure of summer equally rewarding. Pissarro also began to paint in series, restlessly altering his position or line of vision, but relying basically for his visual variety on the changing seasons or the divisions of the day' (Camille Pissarro, London, 1981, p. 112).
The present work sheds an interesting light on Pissarro's works on paper and their relationship to his painted oeuvre, which was often more subject to fluctuations in production due to the artist's own anxieties. 'Although it is customary when discussing Pissarro's paintings to make a stylistic distinction between the early part of the 1880s and the last half of the decade when he embraced the theories of Neo-Impressionism, it is not necessary to do this for the drawings. There is, in fact, a continuity of style, which, while it accepts the theory of Neo-Impressionism, also totally ignores it... Indeed, it is easier to understand Pissarro's paintings during this decade by reference to the drawings, since they reveal his response to new developments in French art without any loss of individuality, as appears to have happened in the case of his divisionist paintings. In many ways, drawing was an antidote for Pissarro during a period in which he had many reservations about the theory of Neo-Impressionism, and an anodyne for the disappointment that he felt at the dullness of his own style of paintings, which is so often remarked upon in his letters' (R. Brettell & C. Lloyd, Catalogue of Drawings by Camille Pissarro in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Oxford, 1980, p. 19). Femme étendant du linge, Éragny displays a remarkable strength and freedom of line and colour that testifies to Pissarro's creative confidence in the medium.
Femme étendant du linge, Éragny was executed in 1890 in Eragny, a small village near Gisors, where Pissarro had rented a large house from 1884 and relates to an oil of the same title, executed three years earlier (P&V 717). It was around this time that figure subjects became a more important motif in Pissarro's work, and he began to paint a series of works depicting peasants going about their daily tasks in the countryside. The present work and the oil of 1877 both belong to this series, which also includes such masterpieces as Femme plantant des rames (P&V 772) or La causette (P&V 792) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Christopher Lloyd has commented that, 'like Monet at Giverny, Pissarro's examination of the rural spectacles that surrounded him was intense. He luxuriated in the changing temporal conditions and found the fogs, frosts and snow of winter or the vibrant warmth and lush verdure of summer equally rewarding. Pissarro also began to paint in series, restlessly altering his position or line of vision, but relying basically for his visual variety on the changing seasons or the divisions of the day' (Camille Pissarro, London, 1981, p. 112).
The present work sheds an interesting light on Pissarro's works on paper and their relationship to his painted oeuvre, which was often more subject to fluctuations in production due to the artist's own anxieties. 'Although it is customary when discussing Pissarro's paintings to make a stylistic distinction between the early part of the 1880s and the last half of the decade when he embraced the theories of Neo-Impressionism, it is not necessary to do this for the drawings. There is, in fact, a continuity of style, which, while it accepts the theory of Neo-Impressionism, also totally ignores it... Indeed, it is easier to understand Pissarro's paintings during this decade by reference to the drawings, since they reveal his response to new developments in French art without any loss of individuality, as appears to have happened in the case of his divisionist paintings. In many ways, drawing was an antidote for Pissarro during a period in which he had many reservations about the theory of Neo-Impressionism, and an anodyne for the disappointment that he felt at the dullness of his own style of paintings, which is so often remarked upon in his letters' (R. Brettell & C. Lloyd, Catalogue of Drawings by Camille Pissarro in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Oxford, 1980, p. 19). Femme étendant du linge, Éragny displays a remarkable strength and freedom of line and colour that testifies to Pissarro's creative confidence in the medium.