.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In 1879, the year that La lessive was painted, Camille Pissarro began an important period of pictorial experimentation that extended throughout the next decade. Monumental figure studies like the present work signify the artist's growing interest in the primacy of the human form within the landscape setting. In addition, Pissarro replaced his painterly, Impressionist style with small, comma-like brushstrokes that he built up in layers on the surface of the canvas. Pissarro's technique also became more complex, as he incorporated preparatory drawings and explored studio-based techniques such as printmaking, ceramics, and distemper. The painter's artistic exchanges with Cézanne and intense collaboration with Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin in 1879 further fueled Pissarro's nascent concerns. Describing this moment of transition, scholar Richard Bretell has written: "All these interests suggest a fundamental questioning of the kind of painting normally associated with impressionism, the plein-air sketch, and a more complicated, highly mediated relationship with "reality" than a simply optical one. For Pissarro in the last Pontoise period, the simple equation between seeing and representing was both undesirable and impossible" (Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven, 1990, p. 184).
Although Pissarro painted the present work at his residence in Pontoise, its subject and arrangement, a female peasant studied in large scale with an enclosed, backdrop-like landscape, likely originated during one of Pissarro's sojourns at Montfoucault, an isolated, rural hamlet that was a day's journey from Pontoise or Paris. Pissarro made three trips to Montfoucault between 1874-1876, seeking out new themes and reassessing his technical approach to painting. In a letter to the French writer and collector Théodore Duret, Pissarro reported on his pictorial research in Montfoucault, stating: "I have started working on figures and animals. I have several projects of genre painting. I am timidly experimenting with this branch of art, so much illustrated by first-rank artists: this is rather bold" (quoted in J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p.146).
Pissarro revisited the subject of the washerwoman with fresh eyes in 1879, producing the present painting by reworking in the studio an earlier composition that he painted from nature. His later treatment has little to do with the quickly-executed, plein-air style of the former. As Bretell has commented on Pissarro's surfaces after 1879, "There is little about it that is fleeting or ephemeral. It is clear from the sheer multiplicity and the insistent minuteness of the strokes that the surface took a long time to create" (R. Bretell, op. cit., p. 154). The theme of a woman washing clothes in a large wooden tub is common in Pissarro's work during the 1880s (J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, Paris, 2005, nos. 548, 1010, 1216, 1217, 1272, and 1381), yet the present work embodies his turn away from painting from nature in favor of crafting complex images in his studio.
Although Pissarro painted the present work at his residence in Pontoise, its subject and arrangement, a female peasant studied in large scale with an enclosed, backdrop-like landscape, likely originated during one of Pissarro's sojourns at Montfoucault, an isolated, rural hamlet that was a day's journey from Pontoise or Paris. Pissarro made three trips to Montfoucault between 1874-1876, seeking out new themes and reassessing his technical approach to painting. In a letter to the French writer and collector Théodore Duret, Pissarro reported on his pictorial research in Montfoucault, stating: "I have started working on figures and animals. I have several projects of genre painting. I am timidly experimenting with this branch of art, so much illustrated by first-rank artists: this is rather bold" (quoted in J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p.146).
Pissarro revisited the subject of the washerwoman with fresh eyes in 1879, producing the present painting by reworking in the studio an earlier composition that he painted from nature. His later treatment has little to do with the quickly-executed, plein-air style of the former. As Bretell has commented on Pissarro's surfaces after 1879, "There is little about it that is fleeting or ephemeral. It is clear from the sheer multiplicity and the insistent minuteness of the strokes that the surface took a long time to create" (R. Bretell, op. cit., p. 154). The theme of a woman washing clothes in a large wooden tub is common in Pissarro's work during the 1880s (J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, Paris, 2005, nos. 548, 1010, 1216, 1217, 1272, and 1381), yet the present work embodies his turn away from painting from nature in favor of crafting complex images in his studio.