Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

After moving to Pontoise in 1866, Pissarro regularly invited his fellow Impressionists to paint with him in the countryside surrounding the village. Cézanne joined him in 1872, renting a house in nearby Auvers. It was on one such painting trip in 1874, in the fields around Auvers, that Pissarro painted the first of three versions of La Récolte des Pommes de Terre (P. & V. 295). Cézanne also painted the same view, without the figures and from a slightly different perspective, giving greater emphasis to the small cottages nestling into the steeply terraced slope behind (fig. 1).

Pissarro was evidently very pleased with his composition of the potato harvest for he reworked this picture as a gouache in 1886 (fig. 2) and again in oil, the present picture of 1893. In this final version Pissarro has refined and developed his subject. The figures are more prominent and the landscape has greater depth. Furthermore, the painting clearly demonstrates Pissarro's assimilation of Pointillism with which he had extensively experimented in the 1880s. The present work is the largest and most ambitious of the three pictures.

This picture was included in Durand-Ruel's successful exhibition of Pissarro's work in 1894. In a letter to his son, Lucien, Pissarro spoke of his satisfaction with the show in general and with the favourable reception of La Récolte des Pommes de Terre in particular. 'J'ai lieu d'être assez content de mon exposition au point de vue artistique, s'entend, les amis sont satisfaits, mes figures d'atelier plaisent généralement ... Degas et Monet ont beaucoup aimé le même tableau, ma Récolte de pommes de terre au soleil couchant (J. Bailly-Herzberg, loc. cit.).