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Lot Essay
Camille Pissarro moved his family back to Pontoise, located to the northwest of Paris, in August 1872 where he had previously lived from 1867 to 1869. In the interim period he had lived in Louveciennes and visited London, but the poor sales of his paintings put severe financial constraints on him, and he hoped that Pontoise would again provide him with a favourable setting for his work. For the next ten years Pissarro's life and work would become closely linked to the town, and more particularly to the small out-lying hamlet of L'Hermitage, situated just to the north of Pontoise and nestling in a narrow, steep-sided tributary valley of the Oise flood plain. He painted more than three hundred pictures of Pontoise, L'Hermitage and its surrounding countryside. These canvases pay homage to the rural solitude that also attracted Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Armand Guillaumin who came there to work with him in the late-1870s. The paintings he produced during his years in Pontoise 'form what is probably the most sustained portrait of a place painted by any French landscape painter in the nineteenth century' (R. Bretell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven, 1990, p. 1).
The bitingly cold December of 1879, which brought a heavy snowfall at the beginning of the month, prompted Pissarro to begin a series of canvases (P&V 475-479 & 481) of snow scenes amongst which is the present work. This wintry snap also led other Impressionists to return to the snow scene - see Monet (W. 552-558) and Sisley (D. 342-248) - however it was with Gauguin, with whom Pissarro had spent the summer months of 1879, that a stylistic liaison is most evident. Gauguin's two views of Vaugirard from the end of 1879 (W. 56-57), with their screen of trees, their misty, snow-laden atmosphere and their blue-violet reflections, betray an obvious debt to the author of Brouillard à l'Hermitage, Pontoise.
The present work at one time belonged to Lord Clark of Saltwood. Following his appointment as the youngest ever Director of the National Gallery at the age of thirty-one in 1933, Kenneth Clark (he would become Sir Kenneth in 1938) gained increasing prominence in the British art-world, being appointed Surveyor of the King's Pictures in the following year and playing a pivotal role in the dropping of Duveen from the the Board of Trustees and steering the National Gallery through the war years. Wider fame came after the Second World War as his books The Nude and Landscape into Art and his television series Civilization brought him to the attention of the public at large.
The bitingly cold December of 1879, which brought a heavy snowfall at the beginning of the month, prompted Pissarro to begin a series of canvases (P&V 475-479 & 481) of snow scenes amongst which is the present work. This wintry snap also led other Impressionists to return to the snow scene - see Monet (W. 552-558) and Sisley (D. 342-248) - however it was with Gauguin, with whom Pissarro had spent the summer months of 1879, that a stylistic liaison is most evident. Gauguin's two views of Vaugirard from the end of 1879 (W. 56-57), with their screen of trees, their misty, snow-laden atmosphere and their blue-violet reflections, betray an obvious debt to the author of Brouillard à l'Hermitage, Pontoise.
The present work at one time belonged to Lord Clark of Saltwood. Following his appointment as the youngest ever Director of the National Gallery at the age of thirty-one in 1933, Kenneth Clark (he would become Sir Kenneth in 1938) gained increasing prominence in the British art-world, being appointed Surveyor of the King's Pictures in the following year and playing a pivotal role in the dropping of Duveen from the the Board of Trustees and steering the National Gallery through the war years. Wider fame came after the Second World War as his books The Nude and Landscape into Art and his television series Civilization brought him to the attention of the public at large.