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拍品专文
One frigid morning, in the early months of 1895, Camille Pissarro looked out the window of his studio in Eragny to find the dormant field beyond, dotted with spindly trees, glazed with a thin, pristine layer of frost and snow. The sixty-two-year-old Impressionist artist set up his canvas and began to paint this familiar view, which had been utterly transformed by a winter storm, creating the present Neige et givre à Eragny. Using a thick impasto of white paint, Pissarro eloquently captures the color and texture of the freshly fallen snow, with flickers of pigment indicating the frozen grass beneath, while delicate touches of lilac and jade invoke the silhouette of the trees in the distance.
Pissarro first moved to Eragny, a small village along the river Seine and a fifteen minute walk from the town of Bazincourt, in 1884. He purchased his house there in 1892, and later transformed the barn on the property into a studio, which enabled him to continue to paint in chilly or wet conditions. This was a lean but productive decade for the artist, as he traveled frequently in pursuit of new landscapes. Yet, between visits to Paris and Rouen, or trips abroad to England and Belgium, Pissarro most often returned home to paint, ultimately producing hundreds of oil paintings and works on paper depicting Eragny and its environs.
Cold weather provided Pissarro with the opportunity to experiment with new colors, distinct from the sunny, verdant palette of warmer seasons. Yet, as Neige et givre à Eragny demonstrates, Pissarro’s crystallized visions of winter were just as vibrant and luminous as his paintings of spring and summer. As one contemporary critic observed the year before, “Never has this painter of light been so felicitous, never has his gaze been so keen, and never has he rendered with such tenderness the sparkle of snow in the glow of early morning” (L’Art Francais, 10 March 1894; quoted in J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., 2005, vol. 3, p. 632). Neige et givre à Eragny features a male figure, who stands in the mid-distance gazing out at the frosty fields, holding a shovel—mimicking the artist’s own solitary posture, observing the landscape with his paintbrush in hand. Pissarro admired and identified strongly with the agricultural laborers who lived and worked in Eragny; he featured these figures frequently in his rural landscapes, emphasizing their dignified, hard-working character.
The charming apple tree with a gnarled trunk on the left edge of the composition is another recurring motif in Pissarro’s work. According to the authors of the painter’s catalogue raisonné, this specific tree was not visible from Pissarro’s house, but could only be seen from the windows of his studio-barn (ibid., pp. 661-662, no. 1030). This same tree, viewed from slightly different angles and bearing the foliage of different seasons, appears in many other compositions of the same period. In the words of Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, “these easily recognizable features... underline how Pissarro, by multiplying perspectives and viewpoints, produced an impression of remarkable diversity using motifs from an extremely narrow stretch of country” (ibid., p. 500).
Neige et givre à Eragny has changed hands only three times since its execution in the winter of 1895. Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie. purchased the canvas directly from the artist in April that year, just a few months after it was painted, along with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Peupliers, effet de soleil, hiver, Eragny (Pissarro & Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 1073), which similarly depicts a woman trudging through a snowy field. Bill and Dorothy Fisher acquired the present work in the early 1960s. This painting also possesses a distinguished exhibition history, having been featured in the fine arts section of the World’s Fair in Stockholm in 1897, as well as the exhibition celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth held at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 1930.
Pissarro first moved to Eragny, a small village along the river Seine and a fifteen minute walk from the town of Bazincourt, in 1884. He purchased his house there in 1892, and later transformed the barn on the property into a studio, which enabled him to continue to paint in chilly or wet conditions. This was a lean but productive decade for the artist, as he traveled frequently in pursuit of new landscapes. Yet, between visits to Paris and Rouen, or trips abroad to England and Belgium, Pissarro most often returned home to paint, ultimately producing hundreds of oil paintings and works on paper depicting Eragny and its environs.
Cold weather provided Pissarro with the opportunity to experiment with new colors, distinct from the sunny, verdant palette of warmer seasons. Yet, as Neige et givre à Eragny demonstrates, Pissarro’s crystallized visions of winter were just as vibrant and luminous as his paintings of spring and summer. As one contemporary critic observed the year before, “Never has this painter of light been so felicitous, never has his gaze been so keen, and never has he rendered with such tenderness the sparkle of snow in the glow of early morning” (L’Art Francais, 10 March 1894; quoted in J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., 2005, vol. 3, p. 632). Neige et givre à Eragny features a male figure, who stands in the mid-distance gazing out at the frosty fields, holding a shovel—mimicking the artist’s own solitary posture, observing the landscape with his paintbrush in hand. Pissarro admired and identified strongly with the agricultural laborers who lived and worked in Eragny; he featured these figures frequently in his rural landscapes, emphasizing their dignified, hard-working character.
The charming apple tree with a gnarled trunk on the left edge of the composition is another recurring motif in Pissarro’s work. According to the authors of the painter’s catalogue raisonné, this specific tree was not visible from Pissarro’s house, but could only be seen from the windows of his studio-barn (ibid., pp. 661-662, no. 1030). This same tree, viewed from slightly different angles and bearing the foliage of different seasons, appears in many other compositions of the same period. In the words of Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, “these easily recognizable features... underline how Pissarro, by multiplying perspectives and viewpoints, produced an impression of remarkable diversity using motifs from an extremely narrow stretch of country” (ibid., p. 500).
Neige et givre à Eragny has changed hands only three times since its execution in the winter of 1895. Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie. purchased the canvas directly from the artist in April that year, just a few months after it was painted, along with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Peupliers, effet de soleil, hiver, Eragny (Pissarro & Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 1073), which similarly depicts a woman trudging through a snowy field. Bill and Dorothy Fisher acquired the present work in the early 1960s. This painting also possesses a distinguished exhibition history, having been featured in the fine arts section of the World’s Fair in Stockholm in 1897, as well as the exhibition celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth held at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 1930.